SECT. II.

REASON AND REVELATION CONSISTENT WITH EACH OTHER.

An opinion hath spread itself very far in the world, as if the way to be ripe in faith were to be raw in wit and judgment; as if reason were an enemy unto religion, childish simplicity the mother of ghostly and divine wisdom. - RICHARD HOOKER.

God never offers any thing to any man's belief, that plainly contradicts the natural and essential notions of his mind; because this would be for God to destroy his own workmanship, and to impose that upon the understanding of man, which, whilst it remains what it is, it cannot possibly admit. For instance, we cannot imagine that God should reveal to any man any thing that plainly contradicts the essential perfections of the divine nature; for such a revelation can no more be supposed to be from God, than a revelation from God, that there is no God; which is a downright contradiction. ARCHBISHOP TILLOTSON:

Sermon 56; in Works, vol. iv. p. 296.

Though some deluded men may tell you, that faith and reason are such enemies that they exclude each other as to the same object, and that the less reason you have to prove the truth of the things believed, the stronger and more laudable is your faith; yet, when it cometh to the trial, you will find that faith is no unreasonable thing, and that God requireth you to believe no more than you have sufficient reason for to warrant you and bear you out, and that your faith can be no more than is your perception of the reasons why you should believe; and that God doth suppose reason when he infuseth faith, and useth reason in the use of faith. They that believe, and know not why, or know no sufficient reason to warrant their belief, do take a fancy, an opinion, or a dream, for faith. RICHARD BAXTER: Christian Directory; in Practical Works, vol. ii. p. 171.

Right reason, no less than Scripture, proceeds from God, and is as a light set up for our use, by which we are enabled to discern truth from error. It is incredible that divine revelation should ever be repugnant to reason, or that any thing should be philosophically true which is theologically false; for, since reason, as well as revelation, is the gift of Heaven, God would be opposed to himself if these were inimical. Light is not contrary to light, but the one is greater than the other. Revelation does not destroy, but perfect, reason: what the latter is of itself unable to discover, the former being superadded clearly perceives. — LIMBORCH: Theologia Christiana, lib. i. cap. 12, § 4.

It is blasphemy to think, that God can contradict himself; and therefore right reason being the voice of God, as well as revelation, they can never be directly contradictory to one another. — DR. ROBERT SOUTH: Considerations on the Trinity, p. 18.

There are many, it is confessed, particularly those who are styled mystic divines, that utterly decry the use of reason in religion; nay, that condemn all reasoning concerning the things of God, as utterly destructive of true religion. But we can in no wise agree with this. We find no authority for it in Holy Writ. So far from it, that we find there both our Lord and his apostles continually reasoning with their opposers. JOHN WESLEY: Works, vol. v. p. 12.

It will not be easy for missionaries of any nation to make much impression on the Pagans of any country; because missionaries in general, instead of teaching a simple system of Christianity, have perplexed their hearers with unintelligible doctrines not expressly delivered in Scripture, but fabricated from the conceits and passions and prejudices of men. Christianity is a rational religion: the Romans, the Athenians, the Corinthians, and others, were highly civilized, far advanced in the rational use of their intellectual faculties; and they all, at length, exchanged Paganism for Christianity. The same change will take place in other countries, as they become enlightened by the progress of European literature, &c. - BISHOP WATSON: Anecdotes of his Life, p. 198.

The light of revelation, it should be remembered, is not opposite to the light of reason; the former presupposes the latter; they are both emanations from the same source; and the discoveries of the Bible, however supernatural, are addressed to the understanding, the only medium of information whether human or divine. Revealed religion is not a cloud which overshadows reason: it is a superior illumination designed to perfect its exercise, and supply its deficiencies. Since truth is always consistent with itself, it can never suffer from the most enlarged exertion of the intellectual powers, provided those powers be regulated by a spirit of dutiful submission to the oracles of God. ROBERT HALL: Address in behalf of the Baptist Academical Institution at Stepney; in Works, vol. ii. p. 441.

The doctrine which cannot stand the test of rational investigation cannot be true. We have gone too far when we have said, "Such and such doctrines should not be subjected to rational investigation, being doctrines of pure revelation." I know no such doctrines in the Bible. The doctrines of this book are doctrines of eternal reason,

and they are revealed because they are such. Human reason could not have found them out; but, when revealed, reason can both apprehend and comprehend them. It sees their perfect harmony among themselves, their agreement with the perfections of the divine nature, and their sovereign suitableness to the nature and state of man: thus reason approves and applauds. Some men, it is true, cannot reason ; and therefore they declaim against reason, and proscribe it in the examination of religious truth. DR. ADAM CLARKE: Commentary, vol. vi. last page.

It is not scriptural, but fanatical, to oppose faith to reason. Faith is properly opposed to sense, and is the listening to the dictates of the higher part of our mind, to which alone God speaks, rather than to the lower part of us, to which the world speaks. There is no end to the mischiefs done by that one very common and perfectly unscriptural mistake of opposing faith and reason, or whatever you choose to call the highest part of man's nature. And this you will find that the Scripture never does; and observing this, cuts down at once all Pusey's nonsense about rationalism; which, in order to be contrasted scripturally with faith, must mean the following some lower part of our nature, whether sensual or merely intellectual; that is, some part which does not acknowledge God. But what he abuses as rationalism is just what the Scripture commends as knowledge, judgment, understanding, and the like; that is, not the following a merely intellectual part of our nature, but the sovereign part; that is, the moral reason acting under God, and using, so to speak, the telescope of faith for objects too distant for its naked eye to discover. And to this is opposed, in scriptural language, folly and idolatry and blindness, and other such terms of reproof. According to Pusey, the forty-fourth chapter of Isaiah is rationalism, and the man who bowed down to the stock of a tree was a humble man, who did not inquire, but believe. But if Isaiah be right, and speaks the words of God, then Pusey, and the man who bowed down to the stock of a tree, should learn that God is not served by folly. Faith without reason is not properly faith, but mere power-worship; and power-worship may be devil-worship; for it is reason which entertains the idea of God, an idea essentially made up of truth and goodness, no less than of power. . . . If this were considered, men would be more careful of speaking disparagingly of reason, seeing that is the necessary condition of the existence of faith. It is quite true, that, when we have attained to faith, it supersedes reason; we walk by sunlight, rather than by moonlight; following the guidance

of infinite reason, instead of finite. But how are we to attain to faith? ——in other words, how can we distinguish God's voice from the voice of evil? for we must distinguish it to be God's voice, before we can have faith in it. We distinguish it, and can distinguish it no otherwise, by comparing it with that idea of God which reason intuitively enjoys; the gift of reason being God's original revelation of himself to man. Now, if the voice which comes to us from the unseen world agree not with this idea, we have no choice but to pronounce it not to be God's voice; for no signs of power, in confirmation of it, can alone prove it to be God's. God is not power only, but power and truth and holiness; and the existence of even infinite power does not necessarily involve in it truth and holiness also. . . . . It is no less true, that, while there is, on the one side, a faculty higher than the understanding, which is entitled to pronounce upon its defects, so there is a clamor often raised against it, not from above, but from below, the clamor of mere shallowness and ignorance and passion. Of this sort is some of the outcry which is raised against rationalism. Men do not leap, per saltum mortalem, from ordinary folly to divine wisdom; and the foolish have no right to think they are angels, because they are not humanly wise. There is a deep and universal truth in St. Paul's words, where he says, that Christians wish "not to be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality may be swallowed up of life." Wisdom is gained, not by renouncing or despising the understanding, but by adding to its perfect work the perfect work of reason; and of reason's perfection, faith. DR. THOMAS ARNOLD: Letter 143, in Life and Correspondence, p. 286; and Miscellaneous Works, pp. 266-7, 270.

God is the original of natural truth, as well as of that which comes by particular revelation. No proposition, therefore, which is repugnant to the fundamental principles of reason can be the sense of any part of the word of God. THOMAS HARTWELL HORNE: Introduction to the Holy Scriptures, vol. i. p. 356.

Too many have not scrupled to affirm, that the truths of reason are at variance with those of revelation; that the volume of nature and the volume of history contradict the volume of God's word; and that the only way of cleaving to the last is to close and fling away the other two. Yet this is impossible. Man cannot disbelieve that which the legitimate exercise of all his faculties compels him to acknowledge. He is so framed that reason is the lord of his mind, and intellectually he must obey it. JULIUS CHARLES HARE: Mission of the Comforter, vol. i. p. 204.

We allow that the reason and conscience of man are to judge of that [the Christian] revelation, so far as its truths come within the domain of conscious knowledge. In saying this, we speak with the utmost distinctness. We are not exalting reason above revelation; we are not speaking of a self-sufficient reason, but of a reason joined with devout affections, and enlightened by the Spirit of Truth. It is too often the folly of Christian divines, in decrying a false reason, to speak disparagingly of all rational power, and thus make revelation unreasonable. But it is, first of all, untrue, and cuts away the foundation of Christianity. It puts out the eye by which we see the light. If the mind could have no idea of God, it could not receive the truth of God in his Son Jesus Christ; if the conscience have no perception of moral sight, it could not recognize the perfect holiness of our Lord, or the obligation of duty to him; if the soul have no thought or longing after immortality, his resurrection and gift of eternal life are robbed of their power. Church Review for Jan. 1855; vol. vii. pp. 504–5.

The quotations in this section have been made, not for the purpose of showing that the dictates of reason, and the teachings of each and of all portions of Scripture, are entirely coincident one with another, but merely that whatever has been revealed by God through the utterances or the writings of inspired men never has contradicted, and never can contradict, the judgments which are formed by a proper use of the intellectual powers. The revelations which are recorded in the Bible as having been made to the Hebrews by Moses and the prophets, and to mankind by Jesus and his apostles, unquestionably afford us higher and clearer views of the will and character of Almighty God, and of our relation to him and the great family of rational beings, than were ever reached by men of the loftiest order of intellect, when unaided by supernatural light from Heaven. But, when these revelations are brought home to the human mind, they must either be felt to harmonize with the laws of our common reason, or must go to prove that the faculty of our nature which discerns the alleged revelations to have come from God is unworthy of our confidence; thus destroying, as it were, the very foundation of our faith in a supernatural message. If, therefore, any professedly divine communication, though sounding in our ears from the vault of the eternal heavens, or borne to us by the holiest and highest of divine messengers, were found to proclaim doctrines derogatory to God, or inimical to the principles which lie embedded in the constitution of our moral and mental nature, we could have no assurance that they came from the Author of wisdom and of every good and perfect gift. In such circumstances, indeed, we might make a feint of surrendering our understandings; but, in the very act of retractation, and in opposition to all the forces of our will, we should feel compelled to say, with the poet, that

"When Faith is virtue, Reason makes it so."