such as will
create orthodoxy without bigotry, and charity without latitude. If we have
to dread their going forth with hesitating opinions, teaching, through
their very silence concerning the mysterious realities which constitute
the very essence of Christianity, another gospel than that which was once
for all miraculously revealed; there is almost equal ground for alarm if
they go forth, able only to repeat the shibboleths of a professional
creed, and unable to give a reason of the glorious hope that is in them.
In the former case they will fail to teach historic and dogmatic
Christianity, because they do not believe it; in the latter because they
do not understand its meaning and evidence. If they need piety as the
first requisite, they need knowledge as the second. In certain conditions
of the church, study is second only to prayer itself as an instrument for
the Christian evangelist.

It is hoped, therefore, that a sketch of a department not previously
treated as a whole, may indirectly be an aid to the Christian faith, if it
shall perform the humble office of supplying some elements of instruction
to the Christian student.

Such a purpose however would hardly have justified the introduction of the
subject here. The motive which dictated its consideration was much more
practical. It was hoped that the answer to many species of doubt would be
found by referring them to the forms of thought or of philosophy from
which they had sprung; that it would be possible to perceive how they
might be refuted, by understanding why and how men have come to believe
them.(1010) This is a study of mental pathology seldom undertaken. The
practical aim of Christian writers has generally suggested to them a
readier mode of treating the history of unbelief, by referring its origin
to intellectual pride; and, if any margin remained unaccounted for by this
explanation, to refer it to an invisible agent, the direct operation of
Satan.(1011) Such a method, however true, commits the error, against which
Bacon utters a warning, of ascending at once to the most general causes
without interpolating the intermediate. It ignores the intellectual class
of causes, and omits to trace the subtlety of their mode of
manifestation;--a problem equally interesting, whether they be regarded as
original causes of doubt, or only as secondary instruments obeying the
impulse of the emotional causes. It would have been possible to
investigate the subject, by