One more subject of examination, and that not the least important, is suggested by the foregoing passages. Mention has been made in them once or twice of the facts of revelation; the doctrines are said to be facts, and such facts to be all in all. Now according to Catholic teaching, doctrines are divine truths, which are the objects of faith, not of sight; we may call them facts, if we will, so that we recollect that they are sometimes facts of the unseen world, not of this, and that they are not synonymous with actions or works. But Mr. E., by a remarkable assumption, rules it that doctrines are facts of the revealed divine governance, so that a doctrine is made the same as a divine action or work. As Providence has given us a series of moral facts by nature, as in the history of nations or of the individual, from which we deduce the doctrines of natural religion, so Scripture is supposed to reveal a second series of facts, or works, in the course of the three dispensations, especially the Christian, which are the doctrines of religion, or at least, which together with the principle involved in them, are the doctrines. Thus Christ's death upon the cross is an historical fact; the meaning of it is what illustrates and quickens it, and adapts it for influencing the soul. Now if we ask, how on this theory the doctrine of the Trinity is a fact in the divine governance, we are answered that it must be thrown into another shape, if I may so express myself; it must be made subordinate, and separated into parts. The series of Christian facts passes from the birth to the death of Christ, and thence to the mission of the Holy Ghost. We must view the divinity of Christ in His death, the divinity of the Spirit in His mission. That they are therein exhibited, I grant; but the theory requires us to consider this the scriptural mode of their exhibition. This theory is supposed by some of its upholders to be sanctioned by Butler; for they seem to argue, that as the course of nature is a collection of manifested facts, so is the course of grace. But that great divine knew better than to infer, from what he saw, what was to be expected in a Revelation, were it to be granted. He asserts plainly the contrary; his whole argument is merely negative, defending Christianity as far as nature enables him to do so,—not limiting the course of the revelation to the analogy of nature. Accordingly the Church Catholic has ever taught, (as in
