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APPENDIX,

CONTAINING COMMENTS AND ESSAYS.

(A.)

In this use of the word 'sufficiency,' I pre-suppose on the part of the reader or hearer an humble and docile state of mind, and above all the practice of prayer, as the necessary condition of such a state, and the best if not the only means of becoming sincere to our own hearts. Christianity is especially differenced from all other religions by being grounded on facts which all men alike have the same means of ascertaining with equal facility, and which no man can ascertain for another. Each person must be herein querist and respondent to himself; Am I sick, and therefore need a physician?-Am I in spiritual slavery, and therefore need a ransomer?-Have I given a pledge, which must be redeemed, and which I cannot redeem by my own resources?-Am I at one with God, and is my will concentric with that holy power, which is at once the constitutive will and the supreme reason of the universe? -If not, must I not be mad if I do not seek, and miserable if I do not discover and embrace, the means of atonement?* To collect, to weigh, and to appreciate historical proofs and presumptions is not equally within the

* This is a mistaken etymology, and consequently a dull, though unintentional, pun. Our atone is, doubtless, of the same stock with the Teutonic aussöhnen, versöhnen, the AngloSaxon taking the t for the s.

S

means and opportunities of every man. The testimony of books of history is one of the strong and stately pillars of the Church of Christ; but it is not the foundation, nor can it without loss of essential faith be mistaken or substituted for the foundation. There is a sect, which in its scornful pride of antipathy to mysteries (that is, to all those doctrines of the pure and intuitive reason, which transcend the understanding, and can never be contemplated by it, but through a false and falsifying perspective) affects to condemn all inward and preliminary experience as enthusiastic delusion or fanatical contagion. Historic evidence, on the other hand, these men treat, as the Jews of old treated the brazen serpent, which was the relic and evidence of the miracles worked by Moses in the wilderness. They turned it into an idol: and therefore Hezekiah (who clave to the Lord, and did right in the sight of the Lord, so that after him was none like him, among all the kings of Judah, nor any that were before him) not only removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves; but likewise brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses hud made: for the children of Israel did burn incense to it. (2 Kings xviii.)

To preclude an error so pernicious, I request that to the wilful neglect of those outward ministrations of the word which all Englishmen have the privilege of attending, the reader will add the setting at nought likewise of those inward means of grace, without which the language of the Scriptures, in the most faithful translation and in the purest and plainest English, must nevertheless continue to be a dead language, a sun-dial by moonlight.

(B.)

Reason and Religion differ only as a two-fold application of the same power. But if we are obliged to distinguish, we must ideally separate. In this sense I affirm that reason is the knowledge of the laws of the whole

considered as one: and as such it is contradistinguished from the understanding, which concerns itself exclusively with the quantities, qualities, and relations of particulars in time and space. The understanding, therefore, is the science of phænomena, and of their subsumption under distinct kinds and sorts, (genera and species.) Its functions supply the rules and constitute the possibility of experience; but remain mere logical forms, except as far as materials are given by the senses or sensations. The reason, on the other hand, is the science of the universal, having the ideas of oneness and allness as its two elements or primary factors. In the language of the old Schools, Unity+Omneity Totality.

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The reason first manifests itself in man by the tendency to the comprehension of all as one. We can neither rest in an infinite that is not at the same time a whole, nor in a whole that is not infinite. Hence the natural man is always in a state either of resistance or of captivity to the understanding and the fancy, which cannot represent totatality without limit: and he either loses the one in the striving after the infinite, that is, atheism with or without polytheism, or he loses the infinite in the striving after the one, and then sinks into anthropomorphic monotheism.

The rational instinct, therefore, taken abstractedly and unbalanced, did, in itself, (ye shall be as gods, Gen. iii. 5.) and in its consequences, (the lusts of the flesh, the eye, and the understanding, as in v. 5.) form the original temptation, through which man fell: and in all ages has continued to originate the same, even from Adam, in whom we all fell, to the atheists who deified the human reason in the person of a harlot during the earlier period of the French Revolution.

To this tendency, therefore, religion, as the consideration of the particular and individual, (in which respect it takes up and identifies with itself the excellence of the understanding) but of the individual, as it exists and has

its being in the universal (in which respect it is one with the pure reason,)—to this tendency, I say, religion assigns the due limits, and is the echo of the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden. Hence in all the ages and countries of civilization religion has been the parent and fosterer of the fine arts, as of poetry, music, painting, and the like, the common essence of which consists in a similar union of the universal and the individual. In this union, moreover, is contained the true sense of the ideal. Under the old Law the altar, the curtains, the priestly vestments, and whatever else was to represent the beauty of holiness, had an ideal character: and the Temple itself was a master-piece of ideal beauty.

There exists in the human being, at least in man fully developed, no mean symbol of tri-unity in reason, religion, and the will. For each of the three, though a distinct agency, implies and demands the other two, and loses its own nature at the moment that from distinction it passes into division or separation. The perfect frame of a man is the perfect frame of a state: and in the light of this idea we must read Plato's Republic.*

The comprehension, impartiality, and far-sightedness of reason, (the legislative of our nature) taken singly and exclusively, becomes mere visionariness in intellect, and indolence or hard-heartedness in morals. It is the science of cosmopolitism without country, of philanthropy without neighbourliness or consanguinity, in short, of all the impostures of that philosophy of the French Revolution, which would sacrifice each to the shadowy idol of all. For Jacobinism is monstrum hybridum, made up in part of despotism, or the lust of rule grounded in selfness; and in part of abstract reason misapplied to objects that be

*If I judge rightly, this celebrated work is to 'The History of the Town of Man-soul,' what Plato was to John Bunyan.