OF HEALTH AND HUMAN NATURE. 55 



reason for our not totally perishing as our senses would lead us 

 to suppose. But because we refuse to listen to a mere hypo- 

 thesis we are not to deny the resurrection. For if a divine 

 revelation pronounce that there shall be another order of things 

 in which the mind shall exist again, we ought firmly to believe 

 it, because neither our experience nor our reason can inform us 

 what will be hereafter, and we must be senseless to start 

 objections on a point beyond the penetration of our faculties.* 

 We have a Divine revelation which so pronounces, not that we 

 are naturally immortal, but that " in Adam (by nature) all die," 

 have our being utterly extinguished, and in another order of 

 things, when the fashion of this world shall have passed away 

 and time shall be no more, that in Christ (by the free, additional, 

 gift of God, granted through the obedience of our Saviour) we 

 shall all again be made alive. A miracle would not have been 

 necessary to convince us of a truth discoverable by sense and 

 reason. That the promises of revelation are the proper and only 

 foundation of our hopes of immortality, was the opinion of the 

 late Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge, 

 whose gigantic intellect and sincere love of truth render his 

 opinions weightier than the decrees of councils. " I have no 

 hope of a future existence," says he, " except that which is 



* " Nor can we be obliged, where we have the clear and evident sentence of 

 reason, to quit it for the contrary opinion, under a pretence that it is a matter 

 of faith, which can have no authority against the plain dictates of reason. But 

 there are many things wherein we have very imperfect notions, or none at all ; 

 and other things, of whose past, present, or future existence, by the actual use 

 of our faculties, we can have no knowledge; these, as being beyond the discovery 

 of our natural faculties, and above reason, are, when revealed, the proper 

 matter of faith. Thus, that part of the angels rebelled against God, and thereby 

 lost their first happy state, and that the dead shall rise and live again ; these and 

 the like, being beyond the discovery of reason, are purely matters of faith, with 

 which reason has nothing directly to do." Locke, Essay on Human Under- 

 standing, iv. ch 18. 



Reason's province is only to examine the proofs of the authenticity of reve- 

 lation, and faith must thus be founded on reason. 



