Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 3.djvu/152

4 any events or facts, however marvellous or extraordinary, and a consequent measuring of the credibility of things, not by the power and other attributes of God, but by our own knowledge; a limiting the possible to the actual, and denying the indefinite range of God's operations beyond our means of apprehending them. Mr. Hume openly avows this principle, declaring it to be unphilosophical to suppose that Almighty God can do any thing, but what we see he does. And, though we may not profess it, we too often, it is to be feared, act upon it at the present day. Instead of looking out of ourselves, and trying to catch glimpses of God's workings, from any quarter,—throwing ourselves forward upon Him and waiting on Him, we sit at home bringing everything to ourselves, enthroning ourselves as the centre of all things, and refusing to believe any thing that does not force itself upon our minds as true. Our private judgment is made everything to us,—is contemplated, recognized, and referred to as the arbiter of all questions, and as independent of every thing external to us. Nothing is considered to have an existence except so far forth as our minds discern it. The notion of half views and partial knowledge, of guesses, surmises, hopes and fears, of truths faintly apprehended and not understood, of isolated facts in the great scheme of providence, in a word, of Mystery, is discarded. Hence a distinction is drawn between what is called Objective and Subjective Truth, and Religion is said to consist in a reception of the latter. By Objective Truth is meant the Religious System considered as existing in itself, external to this or that particular mind: by Subjective, is meant that which each mind receives in particular, and considers to be such. To believe in Objective Truth is to throw ourselves forward upon that which we have but partially mastered or made Subjective; to embrace, maintain, and use general propositions which are greater than our own capacity, as if we were contemplating what is real and independent of human judgment. Such a belief seems to the Rationalist superstitious and unmeaning, and he consequently confines faith to the province of Subjective Truth, or to the reception of doctrine, as, and so far as it is met and apprehended by the