Faith may exist, as I said, without the action of the understanding, but never without that of the reason.  It may exist independent of the understanding, because faith in God is the natural result of the idea of God:  and that idea belongs to the reason, and the understanding is not concerned with it.  But when a special revelation has been given us, through human instruments; when the understanding is called in to certify the particular fact, that in such and such particular persons, writings, or events, God has made himself manifest in an extraordinary manner; it is the human instrumentality which requires the judgment of the understanding; the bringing in of human characters, and sensible facts, which are matters of sense and experience; and, therefore, it is mere ignorance when Christians speak slightingly of the outward and historical evidences of Christianity, and indulge in very misplaced contempt for Paley and others who have worked out the historical proof of it.  Such persons may observe, if they will, that where the historical evidence has not been listened to, there a belief in Christianity, properly so called, is wanting.  Living examples might, I think, be named of men whose reason entirely acknowledges the internal proofs of a divine origin which are contained in the Christian doctrines, but whose understandings are not satisfied as to the facts of the Christian history, and particularly as to the fact of our Lord’s resurrection.  Such men are a remarkable contrast to those whose understandings are fully satisfied of the historical truth of our Lord’s resurrection, but who are indifferent to, or actually deny, those doctrinal truths of which another power than the understanding must be the warrant.  It is important to observe, therefore, that in a revelation involving, as an essential part of it, certain historical facts, there is necessarily a call for the judgment of the understanding, although in religious faith simply the understanding may have no place.

8th.  Now, then, the clearest notion which can be given of rationalism would, I think, be this:  that it is the abuse of the understanding in subjects where the divine and the human, so to speak, are intermingled.  Of human things the understanding can judge, of divine things it cannot;—­and thus, where the two are mixed together, its inability to judge of the one part makes it derange the proportions of both, and the judgment of the whole is vitiated.  For example, the understanding examines a miraculous history; it judges truly of what I may call the human part of the case; that is to say, of the rarity of miracles,—­of the fallibility of human testimony,—­of the proneness of most minds to exaggeration,—­and of the critical arguments affecting the genuineness or the date of the narrative itself.  But it forgets the divine part, namely, the power and providence of God, that He is really ever present amongst us, and that the spiritual world, which exists invisibly