so palpable, when
reason and faith either exclude one another, or trench on each other's
domain; when one is pampered and the other starved.* Hence the perils
attendant upon their attempted separation, and the ruin which results
from their actual alienation and hostility. There is no depth of
dreary superstition into which men may not sink in the one case, and no
extravagance of ignorant presumption to which they may not soar in the
other. It is only by the mutual and alternate action of these different
forces that man can safely navigate his little bark through the narrow
straits and by the dangerous rocks which impede his course; and if Faith
spread not the sail to the breeze, or if Reason desert the helm, we are
in equal peril.
____

* It has been our lot to meet with disciples of the Oxford Tract School,
who have, by a fatal indulgence of an appetite of belief; brought
themselves to believe any mediaeval miracle, nay, any ghost story,
without examination, saying, with a solemn face, 'It is better to
believe that to reason.' They believe as they will to believe; and thus
is reason avenged. Reason, similarly indulged, believes, with Mr. Foxton
and Mr. Froude, that a miracle is even an impossibility; and this is the
'Nemesis' of faith.
____

If it be said that this is a disconsolate and dreary doctrine; that man
seeks and needs a simpler navigation than this troublesome and intricate
course, by star and chart, compass and lead line; and that this
responsibility, of ever

'Sounding on his dim and perilous way,'

is too grave for so feeble a nature; we answer that such is his actual
condition. This is a plain matter of fact which cannot be denied. The
various principles of his constitution, and his position in relation to
the external world, obviously and absolutely subject him to this very
responsibility throughout his whole course in this life. It is never
remitted or abated: resolves are necessitated upon imperfect evidence;
and action imperatively demanded amidst doubts and difficulties in which
reason is not satisfied, and faith is required. To argue therefore,
that God cannot have left man to such uncertainty, is to argue, as the
pertinacious lawyer did, who, on seeing a man in the stocks, asked him
what he was there for; and on being told, said, 'They cannot put you
there for that.' 'But I am here,' was the laconic answer.

The analogy, then, of man's whole condition in this life might lead us
to expect t