They who have done otherwise, and have affected to discover, by a supposed science derived from tradition or taught in the schools, more than they who have not such science can discover concerning the nature, physical and moral, of the Supreme Being, and concerning the secrets of His providence, have been either enthusiasts or knaves, or else of that numerous tribe who reason well very often, but reason always on some arbitrary supposition.

Much of this character belonged to the heathen divines, and it is in all its parts peculiarly that of the ancient Fathers and modern doctors of the Christian Church.  The former had reason, but no revelation, to guide them; and though reason be always one, we cannot wonder that different prejudices and different tempers of imagination warped it in them on such subjects as these, and produced all the extravagances of their theology.  The latter had not the excuse of human frailty to make in mitigation of their presumption.  On the contrary, the consideration of this frailty, inseparable from their nature, aggravated their presumption.  They had a much surer criterion than human reason; they had divine reason and the Word of God to guide them and to limit their inquiries.  How came they to go beyond this criterion?  Many of the first preachers were led into it because they preached or wrote before there was any such criterion established, in the acceptance of which they all agreed, because they preached or wrote, in the meantime, on the faith of tradition and on a confidence that they were persons extraordinarily gifted.  Other reasons succeeded these.  Skill in languages, not the gift of tongues, some knowledge of the Jewish cabala and some of heathen philosophy, of Plato’s especially, made them presume to comment, and under that pretence to enlarge the system of Christianity with as much licence as they could have taken if the word of man, instead of the Word of God, had been concerned, and they had commented the civil, not the divine, law.  They did this so copiously that, to give one instance of it, the exposition of St. Matthew’s Gospel took up ninety homilies, and that of St. John’s eighty-seven, in the works of Chrysostom; which puts me in mind of a Puritanical parson who, if I mistake not—­for I have never looked into the folio since I was a boy and condemned sometimes to read in it—­made one hundred and nineteen sermons on the hundred and nineteenth Psalm.

Now all these men, both heathens and Christians, appeared gigantic forms through the false medium of imagination and habitual prejudice; but were, in truth, as arrant dwarfs in the knowledge to which they pretended as you and I and all the sons of Adam.  The former, however, deserved some excuse; the latter none.  The former made a very ill use of their reason, no doubt, when they presume to dogmatise about the divine nature, but they deceived nobody.  What they taught, they taught on their own authority, which every