call culture, are necessary. They may be only one-fourth of man's life, but they are there, as well as the three-fourths which conduct occupies. 'He hath set the world in their heart.' And, really, the reason which we hence gather for the close connexion between culture and conduct, is so simple and natural that we are almost ashamed to give it; but we have offered so many simple and natural explanations in place of the abstruse ones which are current, that our hesitation is foolish.
Let us suggest then, that, having this one-fourth of their nature concerned with art and science, men cannot but somehow employ it. If they think that the three-fourths of their nature concerned with conduct are the whole of their nature, and that this is all they have to attend to, still the neglected one-fourth is there, it ferments, it breaks wildly out, it employs itself all at random and amiss. And hence no doubt, our hymns and our dogmatic theology. What is our dogmatic theology, except the mis-attribution to the Bible,—the Book of conduct,—of a science and an abstruse metaphysic which is not there, because our theologians have in themselves a faculty for science, for it makes one-eighth of them? But they do not employ it on its proper objects; so it invades the Bible, and tries to make the Bible what it is not, and to put into it what is not there. And this prevents their attending enough to what is in the Bible, and makes them battle for what is not in the Bible, but they have put it there!—battle for it in a manner clean contrary, often, to the teaching of the Bible. So has arisen, for instance, all religious persecution. And thus, we say, has conduct itself become impaired.
So that conduct is impaired by the want of science and culture; and our theologians really suffer, not from having too much science, but from having too little. Whereas, if they had turned their faculty for abstruse reasoning towards
