l and moral education of man, considered merely
as a citizen of the present world, we see the constant and inseparable
union of the two principles, and provision made for their perpetual
exercise. He cannot advance a step, indeed without both. We see faith
demanded not only amidst the dependence and ignorance in which childhood
and youth are passed; not only in the whole process by which we acquire
the imperfect knowledge which is to fit us for being men; but to
the very last we may be truly said to believe far more than we know.
'Indeed,' said Butler, 'the unsatisfactory nature of the evidence with
which we are obliged to take up in the daily course of life, is scarce
to be expected.' Nay, in an intelligible sense, even the 'primary
truths,' or 'first principles,' or 'fundamental laws of thought,' or
'self-evident maxims,' or 'intuitions,' or by whatever other names
philosophers have been pleased to designate them, which, in a special
sense, are the very province of reason, as contra-distinguished from
'reasoning' or logical deduction, may be said almost as truly to depend
on faith as on reason for their reception.* For the only ground for
believing them true is that man cannot help so believing them! The same
may be said of that great fact, without which the whole world would
be at a stand-still--a belief in the uniformity of the phenomena of
external nature; that the same sun, for example, which rose yesterday
and to-day, will rise again tomorrow. That this cannot be demonstrated,
is admitted on all hands; and that it is not absolutely proved from
experience is evident, both from the fact that the uniformity supposed
is only accepted as partially and transiently true; the great bulk
of mankind, even while they so confidently act upon that uniformity,
rejecting the idea of its being an eternal uniformity. Every theist
believes that the order of the universe once began to be; and every
Christian and most other men, believe that it will also one day cease to
be.

____

* Common language seems to indicate this: Since we call that disposition
of mind which leads some men to deny the above fundamental truths (or
affect to deny them), not by a word which indicates the opposite of
reason, but the opposite of faith,--Scepticism, Unbelief, Incredulity.
____

But perhaps the most striking example of the helplessness to which man
is soon reduced if he relies upon his reason alone, is The spectacle
of the issue of his investi