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Untitled Article
ness , this implies that the production of happiness is a legitimate purpose of morals : if because it accords with our sympathies , that implies that morality may be founded on sympathy . If the precepts of scripture have nothing intrinsically good ., but are good
solely by reason of the power from which they emanate , their character ought to be as mysterious and incomprehensible to us as the ceremonies of magic : nor could there on that supposition be any reason apparent to us , why we are not commanded to hate our neighbour instead of to love him .
Not being of opinion , with Mr . Blakey , that our reception of a philosophic doctrine ought to be determined , not solely by its truth , but by what we imagine respecting the arguments it may afford for or against our religious belief , we ought not , perhaps , to notice the claim which Mr . Blakey sets up for his doctrine , of being peculiarly favourable to the interests of revealed religion . But though such arguments go for nothing with those who can
trust themselves to judge of the true and the false , who are resolved to believe the truth , whatever may be its consequences , and are not afraid of finding one truth irreconcilable with another ; those who are diffident of their own intellectual powers , naturally dread any doctrine which they can be led to think tends to shake from under their feet , the foundation on which they have built all their h £ pes and purposes . Mr . Blakey , therefore , shall not be allowed the exclusive use of this argument . We tell him that his doctrine is more destructive to the foundations of Christianity , than any of the theories of moral obligation which he has
enumerated ; by taking away altogether its internal evidences , the only ones which are not common to it with a thousand superstitions . In Judea itself , both before and after Christ appeared , numbers of false Christs and charlatans of all descriptions had pretended to work miracles , and had been believed ; believed not only by their proselytes , but by those who rejected them , and who ascribed their miraculous powers to the agency of evil spirits . K these
impostors sunk , and were heard of no more , while Christianity spread itself over the earth , it was not that greater credence was given to the Christian miracles than to theirs ; it was , that the simplehearted men who gathered themselves round the founder of Christianity , far from believing the doctrines to be excellent because
they came from God , believed them to come from God because they felt them to be excellent . The fervour of their love and admiration could not find fit utterance but in the phrase , ' he spake as never man spake / Chf ^ tianity had perished with its founder if Mr . Blakey ' s theory had been true . The world has acknowledged him as sent of God , has believed him to be God , because
there was a standard of morality by which man could test not the word of man merely , but what was vouched for as the word of God ; because of that internal evidence , which according to the repeated declarations of Christ himself , ought to have been suf-
Untitled Article
668 Blakey ' s History of Moral Science .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1833, page 668, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2624/page/8/
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