cause faith in God is the natural result of the idea of
God: and that idea belongs to the reason, and the understanding is not
concerned with it. But when a special revelation has been given us,
through human instruments; when the understanding is called in to
certify the particular fact, that in such and such particular persons,
writings, or events, God has made himself manifest in an extraordinary
manner; it is the human instrumentality which requires the judgment of
the understanding; the bringing in of human characters, and sensible
facts, which are matters of sense and experience; and, therefore, it is
mere ignorance when Christians speak slightingly of the outward and
historical evidences of Christianity, and indulge in very misplaced
contempt for Paley and others who have worked out the historical proof
of it. Such persons may observe, if they will, that where the historical
evidence has not been listened to, there a belief in Christianity,
properly so called, is wanting. Living examples might, I think, be named
of men whose reason entirely acknowledges the internal proofs of a
divine origin which are contained in the Christian doctrines, but whose
understandings are not satisfied as to the facts of the Christian
history, and particularly as to the fact of our Lord's resurrection.
Such men are a remarkable contrast to those whose understandings are
fully satisfied of the historical truth of our Lord's resurrection, but
who are indifferent to, or actually deny, those doctrinal truths of
which another power than the understanding must be the warrant. It is
important to observe, therefore, that in a revelation involving, as an
essential part of it, certain historical facts, there is necessarily a
call for the judgment of the understanding, although in religious faith
simply the understanding may have no place.

8th. Now, then, the clearest notion which can be given of rationalism
would, I think, be this: that it is the abuse of the understanding in
subjects where the divine and the human, so to speak, are intermingled.
Of human things the understanding can judge, of divine things it
cannot;--and thus, where the two are mixed together, its inability to
judge of the one part makes it derange the proportions of both, and the
judgment of the whole is vitiated. For example, the understanding
examines a miraculous history; it judges truly of what I may call the
human part of the case; that is to say, of the rarity of mirac