Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject.
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[I]t is an axiom in science, that difficulties are of no weight against demonstrations. The existence of God once proved, we are not in reason to set that proof aside, because we cannot at present account for all his proceedings. The divine legation of Moses, and that of Jesus Christ, stand upon their proper evidence, which cannot be superseded and nullified by any pretended or real difliculties occurring in the Jewish and Christian dispensations. If we can solve the difficulties, so much the better; but if we cannot, the evidence is exactly where it was.
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This is the main, and almost universal Fallacy of anti-christians; and is that of which a young Christian should be first and principally warned. They find numerous ‘objections’ against various parts of Scripture; to some of which no satisfactory answer can be given; and the incautious hearer is apt, while his attention is fixed on these, to forget that there are infinitely more, and stronger objections against the supposition, that the Christian Religion is of human origin; and that where we cannot answer all objections, we are bound, in reason and in candour, to adopt the hypothesis which labours under the least.
Read MoreIn decreeing from all eternity that a dead man should remain without life, that wood should be consumed by fire, God has not deprived Himself of the power of derogating these two laws, of restoring life to a dead man, of preserving a bush in the midst of flames, when He wills thus to awaken the attention of men, to instruct them, or to convey His positive precepts.
Read MoreIt is true, the unlearned Inquirer may not have leisure or capacity to search into other ancient writings and records of antiquity to satisfy himself, Whether the Gospel-History be of the same, or later date than is pretended; whether the Writers of it are any where recorded as men of suspicious characters; or whether their Relation clashes with any other credible History of the same times. But to his great satisfaction he may observe, that this search has been made for him, …
Read MoreThey have appealed to the bar of reason; the advocates for Christianity have followed them to that bar, and have fairly shewn, that the evidences of revealed religion are such as approve themselves to impartial reason, and, if taken together, are fully sufficient to satisfy an honest and unprejudiced mind.
Read MoreSuppose a future scholar knew I had abandoned Christianity in my teens, and that, also in my teens, I went to an atheist tutor. Would not this seem far better evidence than most of what we have about the development of Christian theology in the first two centuries? Would not he conclude that my apostasy was due to the tutor? And then reject as ‘backward projection’ any story which represented me as an atheist before I went to the tutor? Yet he would be wrong. I am sorry to have become once more autobiographical. But reflection on the extreme improbability of his own life—by historical standards—seems to me a profitable exercise for everyone. It encourages a due agnosticism.
Read MoreThe principle on which all these assertions are received, is not that they have been made by this or that credible individual or body of persons, who have gone through the proof—this may have its weight with the critical and learned—but the main principle adopted by all, intelligible by all, and reasonable in itself, is, that these assertions are set forth, bearing on their face a challenge of refutation. The assertions are like witnesses placed in a box to be confronted. Scepticism, infidelity, and scoffing, form the very groundwork of our faith.
Read MoreThere is a wide difference betwixt establishing false miracles, by the help of a false religion, and establishing a false religion by the help of false miracles. Nothing is more easy than the former of these, or more difficult than the latter.
Read MoreThere is, to my apprehension, nothing more unreasonable than to neglect and despise plain and sufficient evidence before us, and to sit down to imagine what kind of evidence would have pleased us, and then to make the want of such evidence an objection to the truth, which yet, if well considered, would be found to be well established.
Read MoreI should say that such a state of mind is one of very painful trial, and should be treated as such; that it is a state of mental disease, which like many others is aggravated by talking about it, and that he is in great danger of losing his perception of moral truth as well as of intellectual, of wishing Christianity to be false as well as of being unable to be convinced that it is true. There are thousands of Christians who see the difficulties which he sees quite as clearly as he does, and who long as eagerly as he can do for that time when they shall know, even as they are known. But then they see clearly the difficulties of unbelief, and know that even intellectually they are far greater.
Read MoreI saw those who assumed the lordly look, as soon as the subject was mentioned. They put on the consequential air of high authority, and with the tone of emphatic decision they pronounced others more than idiots, while at the time it was evident that they did not know Alexander the Great from Alexander the coppersmith. It was true of the most positive and the most over bearing in this controversy, that they were unacquainted with all ancient history, and would not know Peter the apostle from Peter the hermit, had you seriously tested the matter by particular examination.
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