conception of saintliness which the world owes to Catholic Christianity, a type of character which, while maintaining a marvellous purity of life, is devoid of that robust intelligence without which purity runs into asceticism; which carries virtue to such an extravagant pitch that its results may be more disastrous than those of extravagant vice, inasmuch as the latter may serve morality by demonstrating the repulsiveness of iniquity, while the former tends to evil by exhibiting the impossibility of goodness.[1]
- [Footnote: quid demonstrandum, sed cui forte non esset, sive nec quid esset),
quam illic temeraria pollicitatione scientiæ credulitatem irrideri; et postea tam multa fabulosissima et absurdissima, quia demonstrari non poterant, credenda imperari."—The principle inherent in the five italicized words is identical with that which the writer exposes as an example of the absurd credulity of the Manichæans. The difference is merely one of degree.]*
- ↑ Attempts have, of course, been made at various times to rationalize a Religion whose cardinal principle is Faith. Paley and Butler are conspicuous examples in the history of Anglican Christianity but neither the one nor the other supplied any widespread inspiration to the religious life of the day. Butler, "who had made it his business, ever since he thought himself capable of such sort of reasoning, to prove to himself the being and attributes of God," who "found it impossible to dissociate philosophy from religion in his own mind," and "would have agreed with South that what is nonsense upon a principle of Reason will never be sense upon a principle of Religion," was yet compelled to admit that "it was too late for him to try to support a falling Church;" and it is a matter of national history that Wesley, with his direct appeal to the principle of "justification by faith," did more to reinvigorate the religious life of England than all the cultured rationalists who adorned the English Church in those days. And in these later days Butler has not escaped the charge of "having furnished, with a design directly contrary, one of the most terrible of the persuasives to Atheism that has ever been produced." (Butler, by the Rev. W. Lucas Collins, M.A.) Paley likewise
