xpressed of Christ, of Christianity, and of
scripture.(952)

Such was the man as a teacher. What was his doctrine? He sought and found
in the human faculties the test of truth, not dwelling, like Strauss, on
their tendency to deceive; but, like Schelling, on their certitude. He
placed the ground of religion on the emotional side of the soul, in the
feeling of dependence;(953) and correctively, on the intellectual side, in
the intuitions of God, the moral law, and immortal life.

Assuming, on the principle of spiritual supply and demand, that capacity
proves object, (the natural realism which we attribute to the senses being
thus applied to the intellectual instincts,) he regarded the intuitions to
be real, and traced the mode in which reasoning and experience develope
them into conceptions.(954) But, afraid of giving too anthropomorphic a
form to his conception of deity, he fell almost into the abstract
conception of the English deists; and in the notion of God's general
providence, lost the fatherlike conception of the divine Being with which
the human analogy invests Him. Few nobler attacks however on atheism,(955)
or defences of the benevolent character of the divine Being,(956) exist,
than those which he has supplied. But at this point the Christian must
altogether part company with him; for he next proceeded to argue against
the possibility of miracle or special providence; identifying
inspiration(957) with the utterance of human genius, and regarding
Christianity merely as the best exponent of man's moral nature; as one
form of religion, but not the final one. The Bible, which as a collection
of literary works, the religious literature of a Semitic people, he
appreciated with enthusiastic admiration,(958) was degraded from its
position of a final authoritative utterance of religious truth, and was
regarded as the embodiment of the thoughts of spiritual men of old time
who were striving after truth, and spoke according to the light which they
possessed. The religion which he taught was called by him "the absolute
religion." It was merely deism, built on a sounder basis, and
spiritualized by contact with a truer philosophy.

The other writer(959) to whom allusion has been made, though superior to
the one just described in refinement and acuteness, resembles him in
possessing deep aspirations and serious research, and in standing apart
from the unbelief of the last century, which manifested no loftiness of
aim, nor