5

6

I see a third, after composing a work full of hypocricy and deceit on the subject of religion, publishing it to the world on the persuasion of having heard a voice from heaven. I observe another explaining away the historical narrative of the Old Testament as a mystical representation of the signs of the zodiac. I discover in the writings of another—and him a poet and a man of birth-that caprice and vanity, that self-conceit and misanthropy, that delight in the alliance of vice with gilded virtues, which mark an abandonment of all moral feeling.-I want no one to explain to me the sources of the unbelief of such writers. 7

I turn to our modern historians, and I mark their blunders in what relates to religion, their inconsistencies, their misrepresentations, the impurities which defile their pages, their vanity and self-confidence, and the malice and spleen with which they pursue the followers of Christ.---I ask no further questions.

I open the works of the German infidels, and find the index of their real temper in the follies and absurdities with which they are content to forsake all common sense in their comments on the sacred text, and to exhibit themselves as the gazing-stocks of Christendom.9

I cast my eye on the flippancy of the French school of irreligion, and see such entire ignorance of the simplest points of religious knowledge, such gross impurities, connected with blasphemies which I dare not repeat; I see such an obvious attempt to confound truth and falsehood on the most important of all subjects, and such a bitterness of scorn, a sort of satanic rancour, against the Christian religion and its divine Founder, as to betray most clearly the cause in which they are engaged. I take the confession of one of their number, and ask whether, in

5 Lord Herbert,

8

6 Sir W. Drummond. Hume and Gibbon. 9 The German Neologists.

7 Lord Byron.

such a temper of mind, any religious question could be soundly determined? "I have consulted our philosophers, I have perused their books, I have examined their several opinions, I have found them all proud, positive, and dogmatical, even in their pretended scepticism; knowing every thing, proving nothing, and ridiculing one another." "If our philosophers were able to discover truth, which of them would interest himself about it? There is not one of them, who if he could distinguish truth from falsehood, would not prefer his own error to the truth that is discovered by another. Where is the philosopher, who for his own glory would not willingly deceive the whole human race ?" 10

If from the literary and scientific unbelievers, we

turn to THE UNINFORMED AND NEGLIGENT CLASS

OF YOUNG PERSONS, who have imbibed, or profess to have imbibed, the tenets of scepticism, what is their state of mind? I do not ask what are their arguments—those we may hereafter notice-but I ask what is their obvious temper of mind? In what sort of disposition have they approached the sacred subject? Have they ever shown any real marks of docility and candour? Have they ever taken pains, serious pains, about the question? Have they ever acquired any sound information on the subject of religion? Have they ever made themselves thoroughly acquainted with the New Testament? Do they know what the Christianity is which they oppose? Is there any thing of devotion, and a spirit of prayer to the great and glorious God, to illumine and guide their minds ? What is their spirit and temper? This, this is the key. Ask their parents, their families, their neighbourhoods. The case speaks for itself. Their unbelief is not the result of honest and laborious inquiry, but the careless vanity and indif

10 Rousseau, Emile, liv. iv. p. 264, 5.

ference of a mind inflated and corrupted by immoral pleasure, and which has never seriously examined the subject. They have glided into infidelity by the lapse of time and the current of the passions. They are not, properly speaking, unbelievers. They do not know enough of the Bible. Their vices and pride have occasioned doubts indeed, but they dare not trust to them; their ignorance has adopted these doubts, but they do not understand them. Their va

nity boasts of these doubts, but they are not able to make them a resource. 11

If from this vapid class we turn to the LOW AND PROFANE, and what I may call, without a breach of charity, the RUFFIAN unbelief which is propagated among the dregs of society in the present day, shall I stop to insult the ears of a devout audience, by asking, whether the obvious temper of mind which animates them, and which, if it were to spread, would break out into open violence against the peace of society, can consist with a dispassionate and candid search after religious truth? What, when I see all the first principles of our moral nature outraged, the foundations of virtue overturned, civil order and subjection openly invaded, and adultery and assassination vindicated-what, when I see the most daring blasphemies vomited forth in the face of day, not against the God of the Bible only, but against the God of nature-did I say against the God of nature?

-Alas! some of them deny the very being of a God, and have proceeded to the frightful and unparalleled impiety of exhibiting to public view a wretched, disgusting caricature.-I use the only appropriate words to describe the fact-nothing else than a wretched, disgusting caricature-with the design of ridiculing the ineffable glory and attributes of that omniscient

11 See a noble Sermon of Massillon, Carême, Mardi de la quatrième semaine, Des doutes sur la Religion.

God, "before whose face the earth and the heavens flee away, and no place is found for them." 12

III. The force of this preliminary argument against infidelity, drawn from the temper of mind which it manifests, will be increased, if we proceed to state

SOME REASONS WHICH EVINCE THE INDISPENSABLE

IMPORTANCE of a child-like spirit to a sound inquiry into such a subject. The facts, indeed, which I have stated, speak for themselves, but there are not wanting obvious arguments to deepen their impression upon

the heart.

The first may be drawn from the influence of the passions over the determinations of the understanding. We are not merely intellectual creatures; we are led by our affections. Our judgment is swayed perpetually by what we love and desire. Pride, selfconceit, custom, ambition, vanity, envy, malice, partyspirit, vices of every kind, darken the understanding, give a bias to the judgment, and cause all the operations of the mind to decline insensibly from the path

12 It will not be believed by posterity, that in the year 1827, in a public street of the metropolis of a Protestant Christian empire, a print, such as I have described, was actually exhibited. I have spoken of the writings of this class of infidels from actual knowledge. I have sent for a specimen of their books. I have looked into them. I cannot trust myself to speak of that monstrous compound of folly, absurdity, and profligacy, that disgusting mass of open irreligion-I should rather say, atheism-united with unblushing effrontery in contradicting the best-established facts, and a direct pandering to the lowest passions of the common people, which is there exhibited, and which leaves the French school of infidelity far behind it, for it wants the talent, the wit and elegance of style, the occasional readiness to support oppressed innocence, and the illustrations and defence of discoveries in natural philosophy, which must be conceded to have belonged to some of the French infidel writers. IT IS A GLORY TO CHRISTIANITY TO BE OPPOSED

BY SUCH ADVERSARIES.

of rectitude and truth. Like the jaundiced eye, or the palate infected by a fever, the understanding is incapable of discerning truth, when the affections are irritated and inflamed. We all know that even questions in the arts, in literature, in the sciences, in politics, in morals, are every day agitated with unfairness and exaggeration, when the passions of men are excited; and that afterwards they sink, by the tacit consent of all parties, into comparative neglect, when reason and truth have resumed their sway.

2. Accordingly, something of this docile temper is acknowledged by all to be essential to every important investigation; in fact, to every business of human life. Men object to our requiring this candid and tractable temper in religion; but what is there that can be studied without a similar temper? Will a father, a master, an instructor of any class, allow of levity, indifference, self-will, scorn, in his child or pupil ? Can any thing be done with a perverse, unwilling student? Can any thing be taught without some correspondent attention, docility, application of mind, openness to receive conviction? Is not this the law of our nature, the condition of humanity itself? Did not even the Heathen philosophers admit this? Does not Quintilian require virtue in the orator, and Aristotle demand experience, morals, and even age in the student of ethics? And does not our great modern philosopher, Bacon, require the same in those who would pursue the study of nature? His words, in fact, are borrowed from the injunction of my text: "There is no other entrance," says Lord Bacon, " to the kingdom of man, which is founded in the sciences, than to the kingdom of heaven, in which no one can enter but in the character of a little child." 13

13 Ut non alius fere sit aditus ad regnum hominis, quod fundatur in scientiis, quam ad regnum cælorum in quod nisi sub personâ infantis, intrare non datur.-Nov. Org. 1. 68.