solitary severity: 'He was indeed a friend; he corrected us not for his
pleasure, but for our profit; and what we once thought was caprice or
passion, we now know was love.'

These analogies afford a true, though most imperfect, representation of
the moral discipline to which Supreme Wisdom is subjecting us; and as we
are accustomed to despair of any child with whom parental experience and
authority go for nothing, unless he can fully understand the intrinsic
reasons for every special act of duty which that experience and
authority dictate; as we are sure that he who has not learned to obey
when young will never, when of age, know how to govern either himself
or others: so a singular conduct in all the children of dust towards the
Father of Spirits justifies a still more gloomy augury; inasmuch as the
difference between the knowledge of man and the ignorance of a child,
absolutely vanishes, in comparison with that interval which must ever
subsist between the knowledge of the Eternal and the ignorance of man.

The remarks that have been made are not uncalled for in the present day.
For unfortunately, it is now easy to detect in many classes of minds
a tendency to divorce Reason from Faith, or Faith from reason; and to
proclaim that 'what God hath joined together' shall henceforth exist in
alienation. We see this tendency manifested in relation both to Natural
Theology, and to Revealed Religion. The old conflict between the claims
of these two guiding principles of man (in no age wholly suppressed)
is visibly renewed in our day. In relation to Christianity especially,
there are large classes amongst us who press the claims of faith so far,
that it would become, if they had their will, an utterly unreasonable
faith; some of whom do not scruple to speak slightingly of the evidences
which substantiate Christianity; to decry and depreciate the study of
them; to pronounce that study unnecessary; and even in many cases
to insinuate their insufficiency. They are loud in the mean time in
extolling a faith which, as Whately truly observes, is no whit better
than the faith of a heathen; who has no other or better reason to offer
for his religion than that his father told him it was true! But
this plainly is not the intelligent faith which, as we have seen, is
everywhere inculcated and applauded in the Scriptures; it is not 'that
faith by which Christianity, appealing In the midst of a multitude of
such traditional religions, to p