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    its best instruments . They are its schoolmasters . They exercise , discipline , train , and thus form the mind . If to see was in all cases to understand , and to understand was to believe , the work of religion might be easy , it could hardly be useful . But indolence of mind is not tolerated in Christianity . It unites in happy proportion light and darkness , brilliancy and obscurity , certainty and probability , so that while the mind has full satisfaction

    on all that regards the great interests of the present and the vast concerns of an eternal state , it is stimulated also to constant exertion by the desire of penetrating into tracts that are but partially known or wholly unexplored . By this happy union , not only is the mind kept constantly engaged , but two of its strongest affections are gratified , its love of knowledge , and its love of novelty—its love of knowledge by that declared , and its love of novelty by that which remains to be discovered . Thus is Christianity suited to our

    intellectual condition . It is fitted to develope the capabilities implanted in us , it meets and gratifies the desires that are essential to our intellectual nature , and by these conclusions we may feel our assurance strengthened that it proceeded from the same hand that formed the mind and knows in consequence all its wants , and the best means of supplying them . But of mental activity there was before the promulgation of the gospel no inconsiderable degree possessed by a few extraordinary men . Such in all ages is in some

    rare instances the force of native power , as to break through all barriers , to bear down all opposition , and to rise superior to all difficulties . Endowed with irrepressible vigour , some few of the Pagan world had thus released themselves in part from their mental thraldom , and penetrated the thick darkness which covered the earth . The rewards of their laborious struggle were some glimmerings of truth , not the full light of the meridian sun , but as the twinkling of a few scattered stars piercing the dense and murky

    clouds of night . But what they discovered they discovered for themselves . The people they held incapable of receiving even their few and imperfect conceptions of God and his Providence . Whereas Christianity poured the full blaze of day upon not the few , but the world . It destroyed all barriers between man and man , and bade the swelling tide of truth roll on to cover the earth as the waters cover the surface of the deep . With equal truth and beauty , Jesus declared himself the light of the world . Wherever there is a

    mind to understand and an eye to see , there the sun of righteousness pours his kindling radiance . In the various gradations of society there is no elevation so lofty but he will gild and fertilize , and no valley so deep but he will warm and enlighten it with his all-pervading beams . Are you rich or are you poor , learned or ignorant , the gospel , without respect to these distinctions , offers mental liberty and mental enlightenment to you all alike . It needs only that you are are a rational being in order to share in its

    freedom and in its riches . With the Bible in his hand , every man , the humblest , may surpass in important knowledge the sages of ancient days , may become his own teacher , may become his own priest , may become wise unto present peace and eternal salvation . For those who have been educated in the illuminations which it affords , it is not easy to estimate the amount of actual knowledge which they have derived from it . Yet this should be done in

    order to feel how fully Christianity meets our intellectual wants . And could we by any act of the imagination conceive all the information erased from our minds which the gospel has infused into them , how dreary a waste would they present in all that concerns the great interests of time and of eternity ! Whence but from theBibJe have we all derived our idea of God and of his glorious attributes ? - If we are assured that be is , and that

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    442 Christianity an Intellectual Good .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1831, page 442, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2599/page/10/