puted to our
refusal to educate by means of the Bible only; why should you dread the
sacred text, men say, if it be not against you? And in like manner, why
should you dread secular education, except that it is against you? Why
impede the circulation of books which take religious views opposite to
your own? Why forbid your children and scholars the free perusal of poems
or tales or essays or other light literature which you fear would unsettle
their minds? Why oblige them to know these persons and to shun those, if
you think that your friends have reason on their side as fully as your
opponents? Truth is bold and unsuspicious; want of self-reliance is the
mark of falsehood.

Now, as far as this objection relates to any supposed opposition between
secular science and divine, which is the subject on which I am at present
engaged, I made a sufficient answer to it in my foregoing Discourse. In it
I said, that, in order to have possession of truth at all, we must have
the whole truth; and no one science, no two sciences, no one family of
sciences, nay, not even all secular science, is the whole truth; that
revealed truth enters to a very great extent into the province of science,
philosophy, and literature, and that to put it on one side, in compliment
to secular science, is simply, under colour of a compliment, to do science
a great damage. I do not say that every science will be equally affected
by the omission; pure mathematics will not suffer at all; chemistry will
suffer less than politics, politics than history, ethics, or metaphysics;
still, that the various branches of science are intimately connected with
each other, and form one whole, which whole is impaired, and to an extent
which it is difficult to limit, by any considerable omission of knowledge,
of whatever kind, and that revealed knowledge is very far indeed from an
inconsiderable department of knowledge, this I consider undeniable. As the
written and unwritten word of God make up Revelation as a whole, and the
written, taken by itself, is but a part of that whole, so in turn
Revelation itself may be viewed as one of the constituent parts of human
knowledge, considered as a whole, and its omission is the omission of one
of those constituent parts. Revealed Religion furnishes facts to the other
sciences, which those sciences, left to themselves, would never reach; and
it invalidates apparent facts, which, left to themselves, they would
imagine. Thus, in the sci