alone.  Whatever a positive religion contains beyond the moral law is superstition, which puts emphasis on worthless trivialities.  The true religion occupies the happy mean between miserable unfaith, on the one hand, and timorous superstition, wild fanaticism, and pietistical zeal on the other.  In proclaiming the sovereignty of reason in the sphere of religion as well as elsewhere, we are only openly demanding what our opponents have tacitly acknowledged in practice (e. g.> in allegorical interpretation) from time immemorial.  God has endowed us with reason in order that we should by it distinguish truth from falsehood.

[Footnote 1:  The chief combatant in the conflict over the argument from prophecy, which was called forth by Whiston’s corruption hypothesis, was Collins (A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, 1724).  Christianity is based on Judaism; its fundamental article is that Jesus is the prophesied Messiah of the Jews, its chief proof the argument from Old Testament prophecy, which, it is true, depends on the typical or allegorical interpretation of the passages in question.  Whoever rejects this cuts away the ground from under the Christian revelation, which is only the allegorical import of the revelation of the Jews.—­The second proof of revelation, the argument from miracles, was shaken by Thomas Woolston (Six Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour, 1727-30), by his extension of the allegorical interpretation to these also.  He supported himself in this by the authority of the Church Fathers, and, above all, by the argument that the accounts of the miracles, if taken literally, contradict all sense and understanding.  The unavoidable doubts which arise concerning the literal interpretation of the resurrection of the dead, the healing of the sick, the driving out of devils, and the other miracles, prove that these were intended only as symbolic representations of the mysterious and wonderful effects which Jesus was to accomplish.  Thus Jairus’s daughter means the Jewish Church, which is to be revived at the second coming of Christ; Lazarus typifies humanity, which will be raised again at the last day; the account of the bodily resurrection of Jesus is a symbol of his spiritual resurrection from his grave in the letter of Scripture.  Sherlock, whose Trial of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus was long considered a cogent answer to the attacks of Woolston, was opposed by Peter Annet, who, without leaving the refuge of figurative interpretation open, proceeded still more regardlessly in the discovery of contradictory and incredible elements in the Gospel reports, and declared all the scriptural writers together to be liars and falsifiers.  If a man believes in miracles as supernatural interferences with the regular course of nature (and they must be so taken if they are to certify to the divine origin of the Scriptures), he makes God mutable, and natural laws imperfect arrangements which stand in need of correction.  The truth of religion is independent of all history.]