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never reach the object they proposed ? And if their principles are grounded on faith in the Spirit of Christ , should they abandon them in the midst of their career , and recur to those which centre on a reliance upon the letter of the human form , and upon the restraining force of the law } But this leads further to those other charges of Mr . R . ' s work , which indeed constitute by far the most important portion of its contents , the
condemnatory representation of the direction which theology took for so long a period , and in part still takes , in so great a portion of the German authors : and here it is my duty both candidly to avow the pain which I also feel at such numerous aberrations from the purity of Christian truth ; and yet distinctly to indicate that this evil , when contemplated in the due connexion with the free developement of theological science , ( and how can science exist without freedom ?) appears partly to have taken place beyond the limits of the church , partly to have been a necessary point of transition to a purer theology , partly to nave been less widely extended than the author
represents . It is not necessary for us , my dear friend , to settle as a preliminary , whether those rationalist tendencies , through which the external and internal facts of Christianity are to be transmuted and solved into speculation and reflection , are disastrous and pernicious in any literature , and in any times . Christianity is a divine fact , whose divine character , externally manifested , is inseparably united with an internal transformation of mind , which
remains eternally distinct from any thing which man by his own device can produce : and yet will the rationalism of all times and all descriptions remove this distinction ; this is its error , this its ir § arov xj / evh ; , and herein is it at all times equally destructive , whether it employ itself in the sublimest speculations on the ideas contained in the facts of Christianity , or whether , on the shallowest department of the common-place , empiric , factitious view of history , it strain to evaporate the miracles of the sacred relation .
Yet must we confess that this rationalism appears from time to time in every people and every literature . England has felt its full presumption and full perniciousness , in its deism . In France it united itself , though not at all times entirely , with materialism : and in Germany , it appeared in the form of a baseless , innovating interpretation of scripture , a shallow , wouldbe enlightening philosophy of religion . If then the author rightly says , that the distinctive and specially revolting
characteristic of the German rationalism consists in its having made its appearance within the church , and in the guise of theology ; this indeed cannot be denied , yet it is not true to the extent to which the author represents it . Many of those writers whom he quotes for their unscriptural positions and opinions , as Reimarus , Becker , Buchholz , &c , were never in an ^ r ecclesiastical or theological office : they wrote as men pursuing in entire independence their philosophical systems ; and if the influence of some of them
widely extended itself even among the theologians , yet are not their opinions upon that account to be charged upon the theology and the church . Or can this be done with greater fairness , than if the deistical principles of a Hume and a Gibbon , nay of a Toland and Tindal , were to be imputed to the English theology ? We may further take into consideration , that many
of those scientific men who went furthest in a superficial and forced interpretation of the sacred documents , belonged to the philosophical faculties in our universities : in these it has ever been a principle to allow science to speak out entirely unrestrained , even in opposition to the doctrine of the church , in the confidence that the theological faculty , through greater depth ,
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Professor Sacks 'View of Religion in Germany . 525
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1828, page 525, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2563/page/13/
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