Note 24 — Chapter I

Attempts have, of course, been made at various times to rationalize a Religion whose cardinal principle is Faith. Paley and Butler are conspicuous examples in the history of Anglican Christianity but neither the one nor the other supplied any widespread inspiration to the religious life of the day. Butler, “who had made it his business, ever since he thought himself capable of such sort of reasoning, to prove to himself the being and attributes of God,” who “found it impossible to dissociate philosophy from religion in his own mind,” and “would have agreed with South that what is nonsense upon a principle of Reason will never be sense upon a principle of Religion,” was yet compelled to admit that “it was too late for him to try to support a falling Church;” and it is a matter of national history that Wesley, with his direct appeal to the principle of “justification by faith,” did more to reinvigorate the religious life of England than all the cultured rationalists who adorned the English Church in those days. And in these later days Butler has not escaped the charge of “having furnished, with a design directly contrary, one of the most terrible of the persuasives to Atheism that has ever been produced.” (Butler, by the Rev. W. Lucas Collins, M.A.) Paley likewise thought it a just opinion “that whatever renders religion more rational renders it more credible,” and devoted his genius to the task of making religion more rational, but has done little more than furnish a school text-book for theological students. Further, what Christian, in his heart of hearts, and at those moments which he would regard as his best, does not respond more readily to the sublime sentiment of Tertullian than to the ratiocinations of the Analogy or the Evidences?