he same system of procedure throughout; that the evidence
which substantiates religious truth, and claims religious action, would
involve this responsibility as well as that which substantiates other
kinds of truth, and demands other kinds of action. And after all, what
else, in either case, could answer the purpose, if (as already said)
this world be the school of training of man's moral nature? How else
could the discipline of his faculties, the exercise of patience,
humility, and fortitude, be secured? How, except amidst a state of
things less than certainty--whether under the form of that passive faith
which mimics the possession of absolute certainty, or absolute certainty
itself--could man's nature be trained to combined self-reliance and
self-distrust, circumspection and resolution, and, above all, to
confidence in God? Man cannot be nursed and dandled into the manhood of
his nature, by that unthinking faith which leaves no doubts to be felt,
and no objections to be weighed; Nor can his docility ever be tested,
if he is never called upon to believe any thing which it would not be
an absurdity and contradiction to deny. This species of responsibility,
then, not only cannot be dispensed with, but is absolutely necessary;
and, consequently, however desirable it may appear that we should
have furnished to us that short path to certainty which a pretended
infallibility* promises to man, or that equally short path which leads
to the same termination, by telling us that we are to believe nothing
which we cannot demonstrate to be true, or which, a priori, we may
presume to be false, must be a path which leads astray. In the one
case, how can the 'reasonable service' which Scripture demands--the
enlightened love and conscientious investigation of truth--its
reception, not without doubts, but against doubts--how could all this
co-exist with a faith which presents the whole sum of religion in
the formulary, 'I am to believe without a doubt, and perform without
hesitation. whatever my guide, Parson A. tells me?' Not that, even in
that case (as has often been shown), the man would be relieved form the
necessity of absolutely depending on the dreaded exercise of his private
judgment; for he must at least have exercised it once for all (unless
each man is to remit his religion wholly to the accident of his birth),
and that on two of the most arduous of all questions: first, which of
several churches, pretending to infallibility,