rke, Paley,
Butler, and declare that such arguments as theirs will not satisfy
them.,--We are glad to admit that all this vague pretension is now
but rarely displayed with the scurrilous spirit of that elder unbelief
against which the long series of British apologists for Christianity
arose between 1700 and 1750; But there is often in it an arrogance
as real, though not in so offensive a form. Sometimes the spirit
of unbelief even assumes an air of sentimental regret at its own
inconvenient profundity. Many a worthy youth tells us he almost wishes
he could believe. He admires, of all things, the 'moral grandeur'--the
'ethical beauty' of many parts of Christianity; he condescends to
patronize Jesus Christ, though he believes that the great mass of
words and actions by which alone we know anything about him, are sheer
fictions or legends; he believes--gratuitously enough in this instance,
for he has no ground for it--that Jesus Christ was a very 'great man'
worthy of comparison at least with Mahomet, Luther, Napoleon, and 'other
heroes'; he even admits that happiness of a simple, child-like faith, in
the puerilities of Christianity--it produces such content of mind! But
alas! he cannot believe--his intellect is not satisfied--he has revolved
the matter too profoundly to be thus taken in; he must, he supposes,
(and our beardless philosopher sighs as he says it) bear the penalty of
a too restless intellect, and a too speculative genius; he knows all
the usual arguments which satisfied Pascal, Butler, Bacon, Leibnitz; but
they will do no longer: more radical, more tremendous difficulties
have suggested themselves, 'from the 'depths of philosophy,' and far
different answers are required now!+

____

* Foxton's last chapter, passim, from some expressions one would almost
imagine that our author himself aspired to be, if not the Messiah, at
least the Elias, of this new dispensation. We fear, however, that this
'vox clamantis' would reverse the Baptist's proclamation, and would cry,
'The straight shall be made crooked. and the plain places rough.' +
We fear that many young minds in our day are exposed to the danger
of falling into one or other of the prevailing forms of unbelief, and
especially into that of pantheistic mysticism--from rashly meditating
in the cloudy regions of German philosophy--on difficulties which would
seem beyond the limits of human reason, but which that philosophy too
often promises to solve--with what