COMMENT.

This aphorism should be borne in mind, whenever a theological resolve is proposed to us as an article of faith. Take, for instance, the determinations passed at the Synod of Dort, concerning the absolute decrees of God in connection with his omniscience and foreknowledge. Or take the decision in the Council of Trent on the difference between the two kinds of Transubstantiation, the one in which both the substance and the accidents are changed, the same matter remaining--as in the conversion of water to wine at Cana: the other, in which the matter and the substance are changed, the accidents remaining unaltered, as in the Eucharist--this latter being Transubstantiation par eminence! Or rather take the still more tremendous dogma, that it is indispensable to a saving faith carefully to distinguish the one kind from the other, and to believe both, and to believe the necessity of believing both in order to salvation! For each or either of these extra-Scriptural articles of faith the preceding aphorism supplies a safe criterion. Will the belief tend to the improvement of any of my moral or intellectual faculties? But before I can be convinced that a faculty will be improved, I must be assured that it exists. On all these dark sayings, therefore, of Dort or Trent, it is quite sufficient to ask, by what faculty, organ, or inlet of knowledge, we are to assure ourselves that the words mean any thing, or correspond to any object out of our own mind or even in it: unless indeed the mere craving and striving to think on, after all the materials for thinking have been exhausted, can be called an object. When a number of trust-worthy persons assure me, that a portion of fluid which they saw to be water, by some change in 139 the fluid itself or in their senses, suddenly acquired the colour, taste, smell, and exhilarating property of wine, I perfectly understand what they tell me, and likewise by what faculties they might have come to the knowledge of the fact. But if any one of the number not satisfied with my acquiescence in the fact, should insist on my believing, that the matter remained the same, the substance and the accidents having been removed in order to make way for a different substance with different accidents, I must entreat his permission to wait till I can discover in myself any faculty, by which there can be presented to me a matter distinguishable from accidents, and a substance that is different from both. It is true, I have a faculty of articulation; but I do not see that it can be improved by my using it for the formation of words without meaning, or at best, for the utterance of thoughts, that mean only the act of so thinking, or of trying so to think. But the end of religion is the improvement of our nature and faculties. Ergo, &c. I sum up the whole in one great practical maxim. The object of religious contemplation, and of a truly spiritual faith, is "the ways of God to man." Of the workings of the Godhead, God himself has told us, My ways are not as your ways, nor my thoughts as your thoughts.