Religion passes out of the ken of reason only where the eye of reason has reached its own horizon; faith is then but its continuation, even as the day softens away into the sweet twilight; and twilight, hushed and breathless, steals into the darkness.
It cannot discover any independent truth; it has absolutely no function until truth, derived from some other source, is given for it to work upon. You can never get out of it what you did not first put into it. If man is to know any thing at all, that knowledge must come from some other source than reason.
Let reason count the stars, weigh the mountains, fathom the depths—the employment becomes her, and the success is glorious. But when the question is, "How shall man be just with God?" reason must be silent, revelation must speak; and he who will not hear it assimilates himself to the first deist, Cain; he may not kill a brother, he certainly destroys himself.
Here is the manliness of manhood, that a man has a reason for what he does, and has a will in doing it.
REDEMPTION.
O, if there be any kind of life most sad, and deepest in the scale of pity, it is the dry, cold impotence of one, who has honestly set to the work of his own self-redemption.
The contrivance of our redemption is the most glorious display of Divine love that ever was made, or ever can be made to the children of men.
