possessed and practised by the majority of my contemporaries and countrymen. But if the contrary temper is felt and shewn in instances where all the conditions have been observed, which have been stated at full in the preliminary numbers that form the Introduction of this Work, and the chief of which I have just now recapitulated; I have no hesitation in declaring that whatever the opinion may be, and however opposite to the hearer's or reader's previous persuasions, one or other or all of the following defects must be taken for granted. Either the intolerant person is not master of the grounds on which his own faith is built: which therefore neither is or can be his own faith, though it may very easily be his imagined interest, and his habit of thought. In this case he is angry, not at the opposition to Truth, but at the interruption of his own indolence and intellectual slumber, or possibly at the apprehension, that his temporal advantages are threatened, or at least the ease of mind, in which he had been accustomed to enjoy them. Or, secondly, he has no love of Truth for its own sake; no reverence for the divine

command to seek earnestly after it, which command, if it had not been so often and solemnly given by Revelation, is yet involved and expressed in the gift of Reason, and in the dependence of all our virtues on its developement. He has no moral and religious awe for freedom of thought, though accompanied both by sincerity and humility; nor for the right of free communication which is ordained by God, together with that freedom, if it be true that God has ordained us to live in society, and has made the progressive improvement of all and each of us depend on the reciprocal aids, which directly or indirectly each supplies to all, and all to each. But if his alarm and his consequent intolerance, are occasioned by his eternal rather than temporal interests, and if as is most commonly the case, he does not deceive himself on this point, gloomy indeed, and erroneous beyond idolatry, must have been his notions of the Supreme Being! For surely the poor Heathen who represents to himself the divine attributes of wisdom, justice, and mercy, under multiplied and forbidden symbols in the powers of Nature

or the souls of extraordinary men, practises a superstition which (though at once the cause and effect of blindness and sensuality) is less incompatible with inward piety and true religious feeling, than the creed of that man, who in the spirit of his practice, though not in direct words, loses sight of all these attributes, and substitutes "servile and thralllike fear instead of the adoptive and chearful boldness, which our new alliance with God requires of us as Christians.” * Such fearridden and thence angry believers, or rather

*

Milton's Reformation in England. "For in very deed, the superstitious man by his good will is an Atheist; but being sacred from thence by the pangs of conscience, shuffles up to himself such a God and such a Worship as is most accordant to his fear: which fear of his as also his hope, being fixed only upon the flesh, renders likewise the whole faculty of his apprehension carnal, and all the inward acts of worship issuing from the native strength of the Soul, run out lavishly to the upper skin, and there harden into a crust of formality. Hence men came to scan the Scriptures by the letter, and in the covenant of our redemption magnified the external signs more than the quickening power of the Spirit."

acquiescents, would do well to re-peruse the book of Job, and observe the sentence passed by the all-just on the friends of the sufferer, who had hoped, like venal advocates, to purchase the favour of deity by uttering truths of which in their own hearts they had neither conviction nor comprehension. THE TRUTH

FROM THE LIPS DID NOT ATONE FOR THE LIE

IN THE HEART, while the rashness of agony in the searching and bewildered complaint, was forgiven in consideration of his sincerity and integrity in not disguising the true dictates of his Reason and Conscience, but avowing his incapability of solving a problem by his Reason, which before the Christian dispensation the Almighty was pleased to solve only by declaring it to be beyond the limits of human Reason. Having insensibly passed into a higher and more serious style than I had first intended, I will venture to appeal to these self-obscurants, whose faith dwells in the Land of the Shadow of Darkness, these Papists without a Pope, and Protestants who protest only against all protesting; and will appeal to them in words which yet more

immediately concern them as Christians, in the hope that they will lend a fearless ear to to the learned apostle, when he both assures and labours to persuade them that they were called in Christ to all perfectness in spiritual -knowledge and full assurance of understanding in the mystery of God. There can be no end without means: and God furnishes no means that exempt us from the task and duty of joining our own best endeavours. The original stock, or wild olive tree of our natural powers, was not given us to be burnt or blighted, but to be grafted on. We are not only not forbidden to examine and propose our doubts, so it be done with humility and proceed from a real desire to know the Truth; but we are repeatedly commanded so to do: and with a most unchristian spirit must that man have read the preceding passages, if he can interpret any one sentence as having for its object to excuse a too numerous class, who, to use the words of St. Augustine, quærunt non ut fidem sed ut infidelitatem inveniant: i. e. such as examine not to find reasons for faith, but pretexts for infidelity.