What!
were the hollow truisms, the unsufficing half-truths, the false
assumptions and malignant insinuations of the supercilious bigots,
who corruptly defended the truth:- were the impressive facts, the
piercing outcries, the pathetic appeals, and the close and powerful
reasoning with which the poor sufferer--smarting at once from his
wounds, and from the oil of vitriol which the orthodox LIARS FOR GOD
were dropping into them--impatiently, but uprightly and holily,
controverted this truth, while in will and in spirit he clung to it;-
-were both dictated by an infallible intelligence?--Alas! if I may
judge from the manner in which both indiscriminately are recited,
quoted, appealed to, preached upon by the routiniers of desk and
pulpit, I cannot doubt that they think so--or rather, without
thinking, take for granted that so they are to think;--the more
readily, perhaps, because the so thinking supersedes the necessity of
all afterthought. Farewell.
LETTER IV.
My dear friend,
You reply to the conclusion of my Letter: "What have we to do with
routiniers? Quid mihi cum homunculis putata putide reputantibus?
Let nothings count for nothing, and the dead bury the dead! Who but
such ever understood the tenet in this sense?"
In what sense then, I rejoin, do others understand it? If, with
exception of the passages already excepted, namely, the recorded
words of God--concerning which no Christian can have doubt or
scruple,--the tenet in this sense be inapplicable to the Scripture,
destructive of its noblest purposes, and contradictory to its own
express declarations,--again and again I ask:- What am I to
substitute? What other sense is conceivable that does not destroy
the doctrine which it professes to interpret--that does not convert
it into its own negative? As if a geometrician should name a sugar-
loaf an ellipse, adding--"By which term I here mean a cone;"--and
then justify the misnomer on the pretext that the ellipse is among
the conic sections! And yet--notwithstanding the repugnancy of the
doctrine, in its unqualified sense, to Scripture, Reason, and Common
Sense theoretically, while to all practical uses it is intractable,
unmalleable, and altogether unprofitable--notwithstanding its
irrationality, and in the face of your expostulation, grounded on the
palpableness of its irrationality,--I must still avow my belief that,
however fittingly and unsteadily, as through a mist, it IS the
doctrine which the generality of our popular divines receive as
orthodox, and this the sense which they attach to the words.
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