LECTURE III. ANCILLARY ARGUMENTS, DRAWN FROM CERTAIN TRAITS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, AS CONTRASTED WITH WHAT MIGHT BE EXPECTED FROM THE ANTECEDENTS OF THE WRITERS. HERE are certain peculiarities in the teaching THE and conduct of the writers of the New Testament (and it would be easy to select like topics from the Old) which are ancillary to the same conclusion. Considering the condition and antecedents of the founders of Christianity, and that, on the points to which I am about to refer, philosophers and religionists, in their attempt to reform human error, have very generally gone astray; it is not easy to see how the suggestions of mere human sagacity kept ignorant men like the apostles in the right path, when it is so difficult even for the wise to find it. The first point I would mention is the decision with which the principle is asserted, that conscientiously to reduce to practice what we already know, and so far as we know it, is the surest method of advancing in the knowledge of Divine truth. "To do the will of God," is in the New Testament the great source of further illumination. It rests indeed on a very general principle of our nature-which applies to all things that are practical; and therefore to religion which, if not practical, is nothing. It did not escape the penetration of Aristotle any more than that of Butler,' that we are so constituted, that the only effectual way of learning things of a practical nature, is to work them into the soul by habit, and to give them expression in the life. The great exponent of this principle, as applied to religion, is our Lord Himself, who expressly proclaims it in the words, "He that doeth the will of God shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God." This is the true "Via Intelligentiæ," "The way of understanding," as Jeremy Taylor calls it in his celebrated sermon on the text. That text, indeed, does not mean, Blindly accept whatever you are told, on human authority, is the I 66 "It is well said, therefore, that the just man becomes so by doing what is just, and the temperate by doing what is temperate. But many there are who do not practise these things, but betaking themselves to talking about them (ἐπὶ δὲ τὸν λόγον καταφεύγοντες), imagine they are philosophizing, and that in that way they will be duly affected by them (kai övτwg éœɛodai oñovềãi); doing something like what the sick do when they listen diligently to their physicians and follow none of their prescriptions. As therefore these do not get health of body by that sort of therapeutics, neither do those health of soul by such sort of philosophy."— Aristotle, Eth. II. iv. Butler, with yet deeper philosophy, proceeds one step further. 66 Going over the theory of virtue," says he, "in one's thoughts, talking well, and drawing fine pictures of it; this is so far from necessarily or certainly conducing to form a habit of it in him who thus employs himself, that it may harden the mind in a contrary course, and render it gradually more insensible; that is, form a habit of insensibility to all moral considerations. For, from our very faculty of habits, passive impressions by being repeated grow weaker."-Analogy. Part I. chap. v. |