to be exempt
from that very necessity of patient and honest investigation. It is not
so much the difficulty of finding, as the trouble of seeking the truth,
from which he shrinks; a necessity, however, from which, as it is an
essential instrument of his moral education and discipline, he can never
be released.

If the previous representations be true, the conditions of that
intelligent faith which God requires from his intelligent offspring,
may be fairly inferred to be such as we have already stated;--that the
evidence for the truths we are to believe shall be, first, such as our
faculties are competent to appreciate, and against which, therefore, the
mere negative argument arising from our ignorance of the true solution
of such difficulties, as are, perhaps, insoluble because we are finite,
can be no reply; and, secondly, such an amount of this evidence as shall
fairly overbalance all the objections which we can appreciate. This is
the condition to which God has obviously subjected us as inhabitants of
this world; and it is on such evidence we are here perpetually acting.
We now believe a thousand things we cannot fully comprehend. We may not
see the intrinsic evidence of their truth, but their extrinsic evidence
is sufficient to induce us unhesitatingly to believe, and to act
upon them. When that evidence is sufficient in amount, we allow it to
overbear all the individual difficulties and perplexities which
hang round the truths to which it is applied, unless, indeed, such
difficulties can be proved to involve absolute contradictions; for
these, of course, no evidence can substantiate. For example, in a
thousand cases, a certain combination of merely circumstantial evidence
in favour of a certain judicial decision, is familiarly allowed
to vanquish all apparent discrepancy on particular and subordinate
points;--the want of concurrence in the evidence of the witnesses on
such points shall not cause a shadow of a doubt as to the conclusion.
For we feel that it is far more improbable that the conclusion should be
untrue, than that the difficulty we cannot solve is truly incapable of
a solution; and when the evidence reaches this point the objection no
longer troubles us.

It is the same with historic investigations. There are ten thousand
facts in history which no one doubts, though the narrators of them may
materially vary in their version, and though some of the circumstances
alleged may be in appearance inexplicabl