faith in God, and our notions of the relation between God and man, which should bring back to its origin this part of our knowledge, would correspond, in the region of theology, to the task attempted by Reid and Sir William Hamilton in the metaphysics of perception.
The Scottish sceptical philosophy of Hume is, indeed, throughout irreligious. But his antagonists in this country have as yet attempted little for the satisfaction of the scientific principle by a statement of the metaphysics of religion.[1] In Germany his doctrines have formed part of the seed that has there produced, during the last two generations, the rank crop of religious scepticism, which is now imported into the popular literature of Britain and America, in the new species of infidelity which makes a virtual excision of those principles of common sense that lie at the root of our religious knowledge. An intelligent attention is due, on the part of those who are the authorized teachers of religion, to the progress of a form of scepticism which, while it sublimates the Divine personality into the illusion of the Absolute, excludes the possibility of all positive theological knowledge, by discrediting the original or derived faculties for obtaining ideas of the supernatural, nullifying the argument from final causes, and refusing to receive alleged miraculous events as by possibility creden-
- ↑ We, of course, except the invaluable contributions to the philosophy of religion contained in Dr. Chalmers' Treatises on "Natural Theology" and on the "Evidences of Christianity,"—so full of comprehensive conceptions, and abounding iu vigorous metaphysical discussions.
