ch has no
linear unit; it is to employ, as mathematicians say, a variable as if it
were a constant quantity; or, rather, it is to attempt to find the value
of an unknown quantity by another equally unknown.

We cannot but judge, then, the principles of Rationalism to be logically
untenable. And we do so, not merely or principally on account of the
absurdity it involves,--that God has expressly supplemented human
reason by a revelation containing an indeterminate but large portion
of falsities, errors, and absurdities and which we are to commit to our
little alembic, and distil as we may; not only from the absurdity of
supposing that God has demanded our faith, for statements which are
to be received only as they appear perfectly comprehensible by our
reason;--or, in other words, only for what it is impossible that we
should doubt or deny; not merely because the principle inevitably leaves
man to construct the so-called revelation entirely for himself; so that
what one man receives as genuine communication from heaven, another,
from having a different development of 'his intuitional consciousness,'
rejects as an absurdity too gross for human belief:--Not wholly, we
say, nor even principally, for these reasons; but for the still stronger
reason, that such a system of objections is an egregious trifling with
that great complex mass of evidence which, as we have said, applies to
the whole of Christianity or to none of it. As if to baffle the efforts
of man consistently to disengage these elements of our belief, the whole
are inextricably blended together. The supernatural element, especially,
is so diffused through all the records, that it is more and more felt,
at every step, to be impossible to obliterate it without obliterating
the entire system in which it circulates. The stain, if stain it be,
is far too deep for any scouring fluids of Rationalism to wash it out,
without destroying the whole texture of our creed: and, in our judgment,
the only consistent Rationalism is the Rationalism which rejects it all.

At whatever point the Rationalist we have attempted to describe may take
his stand, we do not think it difficult to prove that his conduct is
eminently irrational. If, for example, he be one of those moderate
Rationalists who admit (as thousands do) the miraculous and other
evidence of the supernatural origin of the Gospel, and therefore also
admit such and such doctrines to be true,--what can he reply, if further