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Untitled Article
doggedly in theology as in politics ; and Lardner ' s work is worshipped like the god Terminus , the slightest removal of which is deemed an impiety that threatens the downfal of Christianity . To purge and define the channels of tradition , that we may receive the stream of historical truth clear , full , and unpolluted , is the first of all critical duties , because its direct tendency is to place in the clearest light , and on the firmest basis , that collection of facts
in which Christianity consists . From these facts we hesitate not to express , our own deep conviction , that the more they are probed , and the more they are subjected to that searching investigation which every period of history is now undergoing , the more will the evidences of historical truth and divine interposition stand forth prominent and conspicuous . Whoever embraces these facts , received through the purest vehicle of tradition , and sees in them the proofs of the special interference of God for the moral
renovation of mankind , is an orthodox Christian ; and whatever inferences he draws from these primitive facts , by reasoning conclusive to his own mind , neither adding to them , diminishing them , or in anywise distorting them , but simply recognising them as the historical data from which he is at liberty to deduce his own conclusions , all this is to him , though not therefore necessaril y to others , orthodox Christianity ; and he would be the worst of heretics , if , while this conclusion was evidently to his own mind connected with the premises , he avowed his belief in any other .
But if a man wilfully accepts a corrupt instead of a pure channel of tradition , if he bends facts to his theories , if he omits , inserts , or corrupts facts for no other reason than that they do not suit his views ; if , instead of impartially investigating the historical sources of facts , he assumes some intuitive principle as the test of what is externally true or false ; such a man is a heretic ,
because he vitiates the foundation and destroys the essence of Christianity ; for the sole inquiry , in the first instance , relative to the truth of Christianity is * whether such and such facts have occurred or not ; and whether , tried by the universally admitted laws of human testimony , we have adequate grounds to regard the documents recording them as authentic and credible or not .
Doubt as to the authority of any particular book , now admitted into the canon , does not constitute a man a heretic ; because such doubt may simply arise from carrying the principle of Protestantism into its legitimate consequences , and the desire of separating the authentic from the spurious , amid a mass of documents which relate to and were called forth by real transactions . A man , for
example , may draw Tory , Whiggish , or Republican inferences from the admitted facts or our constitutional history , and so long as he confines himself to those facts and reasons from them , whatever we may think of his sense or his judgment , we have no right to question his integrity ; but if a man , like David Hume , should first commit himself by writing the history of a particular
Untitled Article
604 On the Influence of the
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1833, page 604, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2622/page/20/
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