The saddest error of the theologians of this age is, [Greek:  hos emoige dokei], the disposition to urge the histories of the miraculous actions and incidents, in and by which Christ attested his Messiahship to the Jewish eye-witnesses, in fulfilment of prophecies, which the Jewish Church had previously understood and interpreted as marks of the Messiah, before they have shewn what and how excellent the religion itself is including the miracles as for us an harmonious part of the internal or self-evidence of the religion.  Alas! and even when our divines do proceed to the religion itself as to a something which no man could be expected to receive except by a compulsion of the senses, which by force of logic only is propagated from the eye witnesses to the readers of the narratives in 1820—­(which logic, namely, that the evidence of a miracle is not diminished by lapse of ages, though this includes loss of documents and the like; which logic, I say, whether it be legitimate or not, God forbid that the truth of Christianity should depend on the decision!)—­even when our divines do proceed to the religion itself, on what do they chiefly dwell?  On the doctrines peculiar to the religion?  No! these on the contrary are either evaded or explained away into metaphors, or resigned in despair to the next world where faith is to be swallowed up in certainty.

But the worst product of this epidemic error is, the fashion of either denying or undervaluing the evidence of a future state and the survival of individual consciousness, derived from the conscience, and the holy instinct of the whole human race.  Dreadful is this:—­for the main force of the reasoning by which this scepticism is vindicated consists in reducing all legitimate conviction to objective proof:  whereas in the very essence of religion and even of morality the evidence, and the preparation for its reception, must be subjective;—­’Blessed are they that have not seen and yet believe’.  And dreadful it appears to me especially, who in the impossibility of not looking forward to consciousness after the dissolution of the body (’corpus phoenomenon’,) have through life found it (next to divine grace.) the strongest and indeed only efficient support against the still recurring temptation of adopting, nay, wishing the truth of Spinoza’s notion, that the survival of consciousness is the highest prize and consequence of the highest virtue, and that of all below this mark the lot after death is self-oblivion and the cessation of individual being.  Indeed, how a Separatist or one of any other sect of Calvinists, who confines Redemption to the comparatively small number of the elect, can reject this opinion, and yet not run mad at the horrid thought of an innumerable multitude of imperishable self-conscious spirits everlastingly excluded from God, is to me inconceivable.

Deeply am I persuaded of Luther’s position, that no man can worthily estimate, or feel in the depth of his being, the Incarnation and Crucifixion of the Son of God who is a stranger to the terror of immortality as ingenerate in man, while it is yet unquelled by the faith in God as the Almighty Father.