reasonable;--not merely the facts of our Lord's miracles
and resurrection; but Christian faith, in all its fulness--the whole
dispensation of the Spirit, the revelation of the redemption of man and
of the Divine Persons who are its authors--of all that Christian faith,
and hope, and love can need. And this is so true, that even without
reckoning the Epistle to the Hebrews amongst St. Paul's writings,--nay,
even if we choose to reject the three pastoral epistles[18]--yet taking
only what neither has been nor can be doubted--the epistles to the
Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and
Thessalonians, we have in these, together with St. John's Gospel and
First Epistle,--giving up, if we choose, the other two,--a ground on
which our faith may stand for ever, according to the strictest rules of
the understanding, according to the clearest intuitions of reason.

[Footnote 18: I say this, not as having the slightest doubt myself of
the genuineness of any one of the three, but merely to show how much is
left that has not been questioned at all, even unreasonably.]

I take the works of St. John and St. Paul as our foundation, because, in
the first place, we find in them the historical basis of Christianity;
that is to say, we find the facts of our Lord's miracles, and especially
of his resurrection, and the miraculous powers afterwards continued to
the church, established by the highest possible evidence. However pure
and truly divine the principles taught in the gospel may be, yet we
crave to know not only that we were in need of redemption, but that a
Redeemer has actually appeared; not only that a resurrection to eternal
life is probable, but that such a resurrection has actually taken place.
This basis of historical fact, which is one of the great peculiarities
of Christianity, is strictly within the cognizance of the understanding;
and in the writings of St. John and St. Paul we have that full and
perfect evidence of it which the strictest laws of the understanding
require.

But the historical truth being once warranted by the understanding,
other faculties of our nature now come in to enjoy it, and develop it;
the highest reason and the moral and spiritual affections find
respectively their proper field and objects, which, whenever presented
to them in vision or in theory, they must instinctively cling to, but to
which they now abandon themselves without fear of disappointment,
because the