cannot understand how it is possible, as the phrase goes, to
blink the question of its truth or falsehood. It meets us with a
profession and a proffer of the highest truths of which the human mind is
capable; it embraces a range of subjects the most diversified and distant
from each other. What science will not find one part or other of its
province traversed by its path? What results of philosophic speculation
are unquestionable, if they have been gained without inquiry as to what
Theology had to say to them? Does it cast no light upon history? has it no
influence upon the principles of ethics? is it without any sort of bearing
on physics, metaphysics, and political science? Can we drop it out of the
circle of knowledge, without allowing, either that that circle is thereby
mutilated, or on the other hand, that Theology is really no science?

And this dilemma is the more inevitable, because Theology is so precise
and consistent in its intellectual structure. When I speak of Theism or
Monotheism, I am not throwing together discordant doctrines; I am not
merging belief, opinion, persuasion, of whatever kind, into a shapeless
aggregate, by the help of ambiguous words, and dignifying this medley by
the name of Theology. I speak of one idea unfolded in its just
proportions, carried out upon an intelligible method, and issuing in
necessary and immutable results; understood indeed at one time and place
better than at another, held here and there with more or less of
inconsistency, but still, after all, in all times and places, where it is
found, the evolution, not of half-a-dozen ideas, but of one.

9.

And here I am led to another and most important point in the argument in
its behalf,--I mean its wide reception. Theology, as I have described it,
is no accident of particular minds, as are certain systems, for instance,
of prophetical interpretation. It is not the sudden birth of a crisis, as
the Lutheran or Wesleyan doctrine. It is not the splendid development of
some uprising philosophy, as the Cartesian or Platonic. It is not the
fashion of a season, as certain medical treatments may be considered. It
has had a place, if not possession, in the intellectual world from time
immemorial; it has been received by minds the most various, and in systems
of religion the most hostile to each other. It has _prima facie_ claims
upon us, so imposing, that it can only be rejected on the ground of those
claims being nothing more th