The analogy, then, of man’s whole condition in this life might lead us to expect the same system of procedure throughout; that the evidence which substantiates religious truth, and claims religious action, would involve this responsibility as well as that which substantiates other kinds of truth, and demands other kinds of action.  And after all, what else, in either case, could answer the purpose, if (as already said) this world be the school of training of man’s moral nature?  How else could the discipline of his faculties, the exercise of patience, humility, and fortitude, be secured?  How, except amidst a state of things less than certainty—­whether under the form of that passive faith which mimics the possession of absolute certainty, or absolute certainty itself—­could man’s nature be trained to combined self-reliance and self-distrust, circumspection and resolution, and, above all, to confidence in God?  Man cannot be nursed and dandled into the manhood of his nature, by that unthinking faith which leaves no doubts to be felt, and no objections to be weighed; Nor can his docility ever be tested, if he is never called upon to believe any thing which it would not be an absurdity and contradiction to deny.  This species of responsibility, then, not only cannot be dispensed with, but is absolutely necessary; and, consequently, however desirable it may appear that we should have furnished to us that short path to certainty which a pretended infallibility* promises to man, or that equally short path which leads to the same termination, by telling us that we are to believe nothing which we cannot demonstrate to be true, or which, a priori, we may presume to be false, must be a path which leads astray.  In the one case, how can the ‘reasonable service’ which Scripture demands—­the enlightened love and conscientious investigation of truth—­its reception, not without doubts, but against doubts—­how could all this co-exist with a faith which presents the whole sum of religion in the formulary, ’I am to believe without a doubt, and perform without hesitation. whatever my guide, Parson A. tells me?’ Not that, even in that case (as has often been shown), the man would be relieved form the necessity of absolutely depending on the dreaded exercise of his private judgment; for he must at least have exercised it once for all (unless each man is to remit his religion wholly to the accident of his birth), and that on two of the most arduous of all questions:  first, which of several churches, pretending to infallibility, is truly infallible?  And next, whether the man may infallibly regard his worthy Parson A. as an infallible expounder of the infallibility.  But, supposing this stupendous difficulty surmounted, though then, it is true, all may seem genuine faith, in reality there is none:  where absolute infallibility is supposed to have been attained (even though erroneously), faith, in strict propriety—­certainly that faith which is alone of any value as an instrument of man’s