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SECT. III.

DISPOSITIONS AND MEANS REQUISITE IN THE SEARCH

AFTER TRUTH.

Imagination's airy wing repress;

Lock up thy senses; let no passion stir;
Wake all to reason; let her reign alone;
Then, in thy soul's deep silence, and the depth
Of nature's silence, midnight, thus inquire.

EDWARD YOUNG.

Diligence and care in obtaining the best guides and the most convenient assistances, prayer, and modesty of spirit, simplicity of purposes and intentions, humility and aptness to learn, and a peaceable disposition, are necessary to finding out truths, because they are parts of good life, without which our truths will do us little advantage, and our errors have no excuse. But with these dispositions, as he is sure to find out all that is necessary, so what truth he inculpably misses of he is sure is therefore not necessary, because he could not find it when he I did his best and his most innocent endeavors. JEREMY TAYLOR: Liberty of Prophesying, sect. xii. 6; in Works, vol. vii. p. 116.

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1. [In prosecuting your inquiries] Begin at the greatest, most evident, certain and necessary truths, and so proceed orderly to the knowledge of the less by the help of these. If you begin at those truths which spring out of greater common truths, and know not the premises while you plead for the conclusion, you abuse your reason, and lose the truth and your labor both. 2. The two first things which you are to learn are what man is and what God is. 3. Having soundly understood the principles of religion, try all the subsequent truths thereby, and receive nothing as truth that is certainly inconsist ent with any of these principles. 4. Believe nothing which certainly contradicteth the end of all religion. If it be a natural or necessary tendency to ungodliness, against the love of God, or against a holy and heavenly mind and conversation, it cannot be truth, whatever it pretend.5. Be sure to distinguish well betwixt revealed and unrevealed things.-6. Be a careful and accurate, though not a vain, distinguisher; and suffer not ambiguity and confusion to deceive you. It is not only in many words, but in one word or syllable, that so much ambiguity and confusion may be contained as may make a long dispute to be but a vain and ridiculous wrangling. -- 7. Therefore be specially suspicious of metaphors, as being all but ambiguities till an explication hath fixed

or determined the sense. 13. Plead not uncertainties against certainties, but make certain points the measure to try the uncertain by. -14. Plead not the darker texts of Scripture against those that are more plain and clear, nor a few texts against many that are as plain; for that which is interpreted against the most plain and frequent expressions of the same Scripture is certainly misinterpreted. — 21. In controversies which depend most upon skill in the languages, philosophy, or other parts of common learning, prefer the judgment of a few that are the most learned in those matters, before the judgment of the most ancient, or the most godly, or of the greatest numbers, even whole churches, that are unlearned. Every man is most to be regarded in the matters which he is best acquainted with. — 22. In controversies of great difficulty where divines themselves are disagreed, and a clear and piercing wit is necessary, regard more the judgment of a few acute, judicious, well-studied divines that are well versed in those controversies, than of a multitude of dull and common wits that think to carry it by the reputation of their number.-23. In all contentions, hold close to that which all sides are agreed on. 24. Take nothing as necessary to salvation in point of faith, which the universal church in every age since Christ did not receive. - 25. Be not borne down by the censoriousness of any to overrun your own understanding and the truth, and to comply with them in their errors and extremes. -26. Doubt not of well-proved truths, for every difficulty that eth against them. RICHARD BAXTER: Christian Directory; in Practical Works, vol. v. pp. 139–50.

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These directions from BAXTER have been epitomized; and others, less appropriate, entirely omitted. But it would scarcely be doing justice to the piety of this great man to withhold an excellent passage which occurs in vol. viii. pp. 29, 30: "Come to the word [the Scripture] in meekness and humility, with a teachable frame of spirit, and a willingness to know the truth, and a resolution to stand to it, and yield to what shall be revealed to you; and beg of God to show you his will, and lead you into the truth; and you will find that he will be found of them that ask him."

He that will advance any thing in the finding out of truth must bring to it that traveller's indifference which the heathen so long since recommended to the world. He must not desire it should lie on the one side rather than the other, lest his desire that it should, prompt him, without just reason, to believe that it does. And so in religion too: he that will make a right judgment, what to believe or what to practise, must first throw off all prejudice in favor of his own opinion,

or against any others; and resolve never to be so tied up to any point or party as not to be at all times ready impartially to examine whatsoever can reasonably be objected against either. — ARCHBISHOP WAKE: Sermons and Discourses, pp. 17, 18.

Whatever warmth or heat any may show, it will still remain an eternal truth, that a calm temper of mind, and a meek and charitable disposition of soul, are qualifications absolutely necessary either to discover truth ourselves, or to judge right of the sentiments and opinions of others. That blind and furious transport of mind which we commonly term zeal is of no manner of use, either for the one or the other of these purposes, but, on the contrary, very prejudicial in all serious inquiries, especially those of religious controversies. — Abridged from LE CLERC: Abstract of Dr. Clarke's Polemical Writings, p. 113;

Lond. 1713.

Let us divest ourselves of a party spirit. Let us never determine an opinion by its agreement or disagreement with what our masters, our parents, or our teachers have inculcated, but by its conformity or contrariety to the doctrine of Jesus Christ and his apostles. Let us never receive or reject a maxim because it favors or opposes our passions, but as it agrees with or opposes the laws of that tribunal, the bases of which are justice and truth. Let us be fully convinced that our chief study should be to know what God determines, and to make his commands the only rules of our knowledge and practice. . . . . Truth requires that we should sacrifice precipitancy of judgment. Few people are capable of this sacrifice: indeed, there are but few who do not consider suspension of judgment as a weakness, although it is one of the noblest efforts of genius and capacity. In regard to religion, people usually make a scruple of conscience of suspending their judgments; yet, in our opinion, a Christian is so much the more obliged to do this, by how much more the truths of the gospel surpass in sublimity and importance all the objects of human science. I forgive this folly in a man educated in superstition, who is threatened with eternal damnation, if he reverence certain doctrines, which not only he has not examined, but which he is forbidden to examine under the same penalty. But that men of learning and piety should imagine they have obtained a signal victory over infidelity, and have accredited religion, when, by the help of some terrific declamations, they have extorted a catechumen's consent, this is what we could have scarcely believed, had we not seen numberless examples of it. A truth received without proof is, in regard to us, a kind of falsehood.

Yea, a truth received without evidence is a never-failing source of many errors, because a truth received without evidence is founded, in regard to us, only on false principles. We must, then, suspend our judgments, whatever inclination we may naturally have to determine at once, in order to save the attention and labor which a more ample discussion of truth would require. Abridged from JAMES SAURIN:

Sermons, vol. i. pp. 44–5, 136.

The Scriptures direct us to inquire into the foundation of the doctrines proposed to our acceptance; and indeed, without the exercise of our reason, I know not how we could understand or adopt the plainest doctrines of Christianity. But it is of much importance to have right dispositions of mind at the time of our inquiry. Such are humility, modesty, docility, and a sincere desire to improve.VICESIMUS KNOX: Sermons; in Works, vol. vi. p. 120.

We ought to have an honest desire after light; and, if we have the desire, it will not remain unproductive. . . . We ought to have a habit of prayer conjoined with a habit of inquiry; and to this more will be given. . . . It is through the avenues of a desirous heart and of an exercised understanding, and of sustained attention, and of faculties in quest of truth, and laboring after the possession of it, that God sends into the mind his promised manifestations. . . . He who without prayer looks confidently forward to success as the fruit of his own investigations is not walking humbly with God. - DR. THOMAS CHALMERS: Sermons on the Depravity of Human Nature; in Select Works, vol. iv. pp. 27-8.

The Scriptures themselves will serve to explain their own meaning in the most essential points, if studied, under the guidance of God's Holy Spirit, with an humble, patient, diligent, and candid mind. And such a mind, even without extensive learning or great ability, will be more enlightened by them than the most learned or the most ingenious, if led away by conceited and presumptuous fancies, and given up to indolent prejudice, or blinded by spiritual pride, or the spirit of party. ARCHBISHOP WHATELY: Sermons on Various Subjects,

pp. 50-1.

Inquiry in theology, as in every thing else, to be fruitful and instructive, must be undogmatic,—must strive, apart from hypothesis and all later superpositions, to ascend to the truth, as it appears in its original sources, or in its successive forms throughout the history of the church. To have recourse either to the Bible itself, or the writings of the Fathers, in a different spirit, and to seek in them, not

simply for the truth in its corresponding and appropriate expression, but in some favorite dogmatic form of a subsequent age, is clearly at once an historical and unphilosophical process, in which much ingenuity may be displayed, but by which truth can never be elicited and advanced. It is tainted with the worst vice of the old method of physical inquiry, from which Bacon initiated our deliverance; making, as it does, the limited ideas and idol formulas of some one age the measure of that objective truth which transcends them all. North British Review for May, 1853; Amer. edit. vol. xiv. p. 49.

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In the formation of your own opinions, be independent; use your own reason, your own senses, your own Bible. Be untrammeled; throw off the chains and fetters which compel so many minds to believe only what they are told to believe, and to walk intellectually and morally in paths marked out for them by human teachers. . . . Be modest. It is the characteristic of a weak mind to be dogmatical and positive. Such a mind makes up in dogged determination to believe what it wants in evidence. Come to your conclusions cautiously, and take care that your belief covers no more ground than your proofs. Do not dispute about what you do not understand, nor push your investigations beyond the boundaries of human knowledge. Men are often sadly perplexed with difficulties which arise from the simple fact that they have got beyond their depth. JACOB ABBOTT: The Corner-stone, pp. 357-8.

The principles which have been recommended in this and the two preceding sections are ostensibly held by all Protestants, whether Trinitarian or Unitarian. But they are contravened by parents, teachers, and divines, when they would quench the love of truth and of investigation, natural to honest and noble minds, by grounding belief on the authority of parentage, of the church, or of celebrated men; by misrepresenting the sentiments and motives of those who differ from them in opinion; by instilling the notion, that no genuine faith, no sincere piety, no well-grounded hope of heaven, can be found beyond the pale of their own narrow creed; in fine, by virtually declaring, "Inquire, but never doubt; search the Scriptures- to find our views; read with the understanding-that we are right; reason with the conviction that all else are wrong. Your interests in this world, and your salvation in the next, depend on the unconditional surrender of your understandings to the faith we prescribe, -on the unhesitating rejection of all contrary opinions."

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These and other impediments to free inquiry, and to the reception of views of truth founded on individual conviction, will be treated of in the following section.

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