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BY THE REV. J. J. TAYLER, B. A.

PROFESSOR OF

ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

BEING THE THIRD OF THE SERIES OF INAUGURAL LECTURES IN THE THEOLOGICAL DEPARTMENT, DELIVERED BY THE SEVERAL PROFESSORS AT THE OPENING OF THE COLLEGE,

IN OCTOBER, 1840.

LONDON:

SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO., STATIONERS' HALL COURT;

AND J. GREEN, NEWGATE STREET.

Il n'y a dans la religion, comme dans l'idée de la divinité, rien d'historique, quant au fond; mais tout est historique dans les developpements.

T. Forrest, Printer, Manchester.

B. Constant.

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE

TO THE

COURSE ON THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.

THE province, which has been assigned to me in the Theological Department of the Manchester New College, is the History of Christianity-a subject of wide extent and of deep and varied interest. I cannot more suitably introduce it, than by a few remarks on the nature of the religious principle, its diversified expressions, and its historical develop

ments.

Religion, under some form or other, is an essential attribute of human nature. Speech and reason are not more specifically characteristic of man than religion. As in some individuals speech and reason are wanting-and, even in some entire tribes, have been found so feebly developed, as to leave the line of separation between man and the brute scarcely discernible; so cases are on record of the real or apparent absence of the religious sentiment from the human mind,—but never through long periods of time, or in extensive classes of men : and the definition, which, on account of these rare and seeming exceptions, should exclude either reason or speech or religion from the essentials of humanity, would be justly dismissed as defective. Humanity (a term, by which I express collectively the whole of our nature) both in the individual and in

the species, is a progressive development; and that may properly be considered as forming a part of the original constitution of man, which uniformly makes its appearance with the gradual unfolding of his higher faculties. Wherever reason and speech have emerged from the sensual depths of a purely animal existence, we invariably find Religion furnishing the subject of the deepest speculations of the one and of the most inspired utterance of the other.

In what then does the religious principle essentially consist ?-adopting the most general expression of the idea, we may reply in the recognition of a power superior to all the objects of sense, and in the consciousness of dependence on that power. The thoughts and feelings of men find an exercise in two distinct spheres,-in the material and in the immaterial worlds. In the former, the foundations of their reasoning and expectation are the laws of the physical universe, ascertained from experience and originally made known through the senses; and here, speculation cannot legitimately proceed beyond the ultimate facts which philosophical research has brought to light in the constitution of external phenomena, and the inferences which are logically deducible from them ;—its conclusions must necessarily be limited by the physical data on which they rest. In the latter (as all information through the senses is by the supposition excluded) the sole basis of reasoning and inference must be sought in the mind itself in the inherent principles of its organization— in the tendencies by which it is necessarily actuated, and the conclusions towards which it is instinctively impelled,-when it turns its thoughts inward upon itself, and contemplates its relation to the invisible power, the conviction of whose existence, while the feeling of the primary intuition is yet unaffected by reasoning, it is unable to resist. Here therefore, in the mind itself we must look for the fundamental data of all religious belief. The processes of logic are indeed as applicable to religious belief, when its fundamental data are once fixed, as to any

object of external experience or testimony: but the data in the two cases are quite distinct, in the one proceeding from without, in the other furnished from within; and in neither are they the result of an act of reasoning:-if they do not exist in the original constitution of things mental or material, they cannot be created by logic.

Every argument, for example, from design to prove the being of a God, includes the assumption of a spiritual existence as its basis. If the consciousness of such an existence be not already latent in the mind, the argument will carry no conviction with it, as it cannot do more than arouse this consciousness by presenting a particular case, in which it may vividly realise itself. Reason can only unfold, explain and justify the feeling, which precedes its own exercise and hence we may account for the fact, that all attempts to reduce religious conviction to a mere logical process, and to convey its fundamental data into the mind by considerations ab extra, when the cultivation of the devotional sentiment has been wholly neglected,—so generally fail of their effect, and sometimes confirm the atheistical tendencies which they were intended to rectify.

The simplest form of the religious principle seems to consist in an instinctive transference of the powers made known by consciousness to external objects. It is a reflexion of the mind itself, in the mirror of the visible creation. The savage feels that all power and movement within himself, and all the changes which they enable him to introduce into the condition and mutual relations of surrounding objects,-proceed from a volition and an intelligence, which he is conscious of, though unable to explain. It is hence that he acquires his earliest notion of cause and effect; and those operations in the material world, which excite his attention and surprise, and which he has not yet learned to account for in some other way, he at once ascribes to a spiritual agency akin to that which he experiences within himself. He therefore spiritualises

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