In receiving important doctrines on the strength of such evidence, and in holding to them against the perplexities they involve, or, what is harder still, against the prejudices they oppose, every exercise of an intelligent faith will, on analysis, be found to consist; its only necessary limit will be proven contradictions in the propositions submitted to it; for, then, no evidence can justify belief, or even render it possible.  But no other difficulties, however, great, will justify unbelief, where man has all that he can justly demand,—­evidence such in its nature as he can deal with, and on which he is accustomed to act in his most important affairs in this world (thus admitting its validity), and such in amount as to render it more likely that the doctrines it substantiates are true, than, from mere ignorance of the mode in which these difficulties can be solved, he can infer them to be false.  ‘Probabilities,’ says Bishop Bulter, ’are to us the very guide to life; and when the probabilities arise out of evidence which we are competent to pronounce, and the improbabilities merely from our surmises, where we have no evidence to deal with, and perhaps, from the limitation of our capacities, could not deal with it, if we had it, it is not difficult to see what course practical wisdom tells man he ought to pursue; and which he always does pursue, whatever difficulties beset him,—­in all cases except one!

Such is the strict union—­that mutual dependence of Reason and Faith—­which would seem to be the great law under which the moral school in which we are being educated is conducted.  This law is equally, or almost equally, its characteristic, Whether we regard man simply in his present condition, or in his present in relation to his future condition,—­as an inhabitant only of this world, or a candidate for another; and to this law, by a series of analogies as striking as any of those which Butler has pointed out (and on which we heartily wish his comprehensive genius had expended a chapter or two), Christianity, in the demands it makes on both principles conjointly, is evidently adapted.

Men often speak, indeed, as if the exercise of faith was excluded from their condition as inhabitants of the present world.  But it requires but a very slight consideration to show that the boasted prerogative of reason is here also that of a limited monarch; and that its attempts to make itself absolute can only end in its own dethronement, and, after successive revolutions, in all the anarchy of absolute pyrrhonism.

For in the intellectual and moral education of man, considered merely as a citizen of the present world, we see the constant and inseparable union of the two principles, and provision made for their perpetual exercise.  He cannot advance a step, indeed without both.  We see faith demanded not only amidst the dependence and ignorance in which childhood and youth are passed; not only in the whole process by which