the mutilation with divine.

I have been speaking simply of Natural Theology; my argument of course is
stronger when I go on to Revelation. Let the doctrine of the Incarnation
be true: is it not at once of the nature of an historical fact, and of a
metaphysical? Let it be true that there are Angels: how is not this a
point of knowledge in the same sense as the naturalist's asseveration,
that myriads of living things might co-exist on the point of a needle?
That the Earth is to be burned by fire, is, if true, as large a fact as
that huge monsters once played amid its depths; that Antichrist is to
come, is as categorical a heading to a chapter of history, as that Nero or
Julian was Emperor of Rome; that a divine influence moves the will, is a
subject of thought not more mysterious than the result of volition on our
muscles, which we admit as a fact in metaphysics.

I do not see how it is possible for a philosophical mind, first, to
believe these religious facts to be true; next, to consent to ignore them;
and thirdly, in spite of this, to go on to profess to be teaching all the
while _de omni scibili_. No; if a man thinks in his heart that these
religious facts are short of truth, that they are not true in the sense in
which the general fact and the law of the fall of a stone to the earth is
true, I understand his excluding Religion from his University, though he
professes other reasons for its exclusion. In that case the varieties of
religious opinion under which he shelters his conduct, are not only his
apology for publicly disowning Religion, but a cause of his privately
disbelieving it. He does not think that any thing is known or can be known
for certain, about the origin of the world or the end of man.

4.

This, I fear, is the conclusion to which intellects, clear, logical, and
consistent, have come, or are coming, from the nature of the case; and,
alas! in addition to this _prima-facie_ suspicion, there are actual
tendencies in the same direction in Protestantism, viewed whether in its
original idea, or again in the so-called Evangelical movement in these
islands during the last century. The religious world, as it is styled,
holds, generally speaking, that Religion consists, not in knowledge, but
in feeling or sentiment. The old Catholic notion, which still lingers in
the Established Church, was, that Faith was an intellectual act, its
object truth, and its result knowledge. Thus if you look into the Angl