development, and transmission; and because, if its principles are not evident, they are in all the higher regions of it infallibly certain; and because many of them are necessary and eternal truths.
Revelation, then, contemplated and transmitted in exactness and method, may be called a science and the queen of sciences, the chief of the hierarchy of truth; and it enters and takes the first place in the intellectual system and tradition of the world. It possesses all the qualities and conditions of science so far as its subject-matter admits; namely, certainty as against doubt, definiteness as against vagueness, harmony as against discordance, unity as against incoherence, progress as against dissolution and stagnation.
A knowledge and belief of the existence of God has never been extinguished in the reason of mankind. The polytheisms and idolatries which surrounded it were corruptions of a central and dominant truth, which, although obscured, was never lost. And the tradition of this truth was identified with the higher and purer operations of the natural reason, which have been called the intellectual system of the world. The mass of mankind, howsoever debased, were always theists. Atheists were anomalies and exceptions, as the blind among men. The theism of the primæval revelation formed the intellectual system of the heathen world. The theism of the patriarchal revelation formed the intellectual system of the Hebrew race. The theism revealed in the incarnation of God has formed the intellectual system of the Christian world. “Sapientia ædificavit sibi domum.” The science or knowledge of God has built for itself a tabernacle in the intellect of mankind, inhabits it, and abides in it The intellectual science of the world finds its perfection in the scientific expression of the theology of faith. But from first to last the reason of man is the disciple, not the critic, of the
