alpable evidence addressed to man's
senses and understandings (in a way no other religion ever did)
everywhere destroyed the systems for which their votaries could only say
that their fathers told them they were true. And yet this blind belief
in such tradition, many advocates of Christianity would now enjoin us to
imitate! It might have occurred to them, one would think, that, on their
principles, Christianity never could have succeeded; for every mind must
have been hopelessly pre-occupied against all examination of its claims.
It is, indeed, incomparably better that a man should be a sincere
Christian even by an utterly unreasoning and passive faith (if that be
possible), than no Christian at all; but at the best, such a man is a
possessor of the truth only by accident: he ought to have, and, if he
be a sincere disciple of truth, will seek, some more solid grounds for
holding it. But it is but too obvious, we fear, that the disposition to
enjoin this obsequious mood of mind is prompted by a strong desire
to revive the ancient empire of priestcraft and the pretensions of
ecclesiastical despotism; to secure readmission to the human mind of
extravagant and preposterous claims, which their advocates are sadly
conscious rest on no solid foundation. They feel that reason is not with
them, it must be against them: and reason therefore they are determined
to exclude.

But the experience of the present 'developments' of Oxford teaching
may serve to show us how infinitely perilous is this course; and how
fearfully, both outraged reason and outraged faith will avenge the
wrongs done them by their alienation and disjunction. Those results,
indeed, we predicted in 1843; before a single leader of the Oxford
school had gone over to Rome, and before any tendencies to the opposite
extreme of Scepticism had manifested themselves. We then affirmed that,
on the one hand, those who were contending for the corruptions of
the fourth century could not possibly find footing there, but must
inevitably seek their ultimate resting place in Rome--a prediction which
has been too amply fulfilled; and that, on the other, the extravagant
pretensions put forth on behalf of an uninquiring faith, and the
desperate assertion that the 'evidence for Christianity' was no stronger
than that for 'Church Principles,' must, by reaction, lead on to an
outbreak of infidelity. That prophecy, too, has been to the letter
accomplished. We then said,--

"We have se