Month: April 2016

Christianity’s debt to its critics

It 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, …

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Christianity and argument

“CHRISTIANITY,” it hath been said, “is not founded in argument.” If it were only meant by these words, that the religion of Jesus could not, by the single aid of reasoning, produce its full effect upon the heart; every true Christian would chearfully subscribe to them. No arguments unaccompanied by the influence of the Holy Spirit, can convert the soul from sin to God; though even to such conversion, arguments are, by the agency of the Spirit, render’d subservient. Again, if we were to understand by this aphorism, that the principles of our religion could never have been discover’d, by the natural and unassisted faculties of man; this position, I presume, would be as little disputed as the former. But if, on the contrary, under the cover of an ambiguous expression, it is intended to insinuate, that those principles, from their very nature, can admit no rational evidence of their truth, (and this, by the way, is the only meaning which can avail our antagonists) the gospel, as well as common sense, loudly reclaims against it.

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They have appealed to the bar of reason

They 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.

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