I 



BOOK IX.] USE OP BEASOK IN RELIGION. 371 



and subtilo imposture ; whilst the sacred Christian faith both 

 receives and rejects the use of reason and dispute under due 

 limitation. '^ 



The use of human reason in matters of religion is of two 

 kinds ; the one consisting in the explanation of mysteries, 

 the other in the deductions from them. As to the expla- 

 nation of mysteries, we find that God himself condescends to 

 the weakness of our capacity, and opens his mysteries, so as 

 they may be best understood by us ; inoculating, as it were, 

 his revelations into the notions and comprehensions of our 

 reason, and accommodating his inspirations to the opening 

 of our understanding, as a key is fitted to open the lock. 

 Though, in this respect, we should not be wanting to our- 

 selves : for as God makes use of our reason in his illumi- 

 nations, so ought we likevv^ise to exercise it every way, in 

 order to become more capable of receiving and imbibing 

 mysteries ; provided the mind be enlarged, according to its 

 capacity, to the greatness of the mysteries, and not the 

 mysteries contracted to the narrowness of the mind. 



With regard to inferences, we must know that we have 

 a certain secondary and respective, not a primitive and 

 absolute, use of reason and arguing left us about mysteries. 

 For after the articles and principles of religion are so seated, 

 as to be entirely removed from the examination ol reason, 

 we are then permitted to draw inferences from them, agree- 

 able to their analogy. But this holds not in natural things, 

 where principles themselves are subject to examination by 

 induction, though not by syllogism, and have, besides, no 

 repugnancy to reason : so that both the first and middle 

 propositions are derivable from the same foimtain. It is 

 otherwise in religion, where the first propositions are self- 

 existent, and subsist of themselves, uncontrolled by that 

 reason which deduces the subsequent propositions. Nor is 

 this the case in religion alone, but likewise in other sciences, 

 as well the serious as the light, where the primary propo- 

 sitions are postulated : as things wherein the use of reason 

 cannot be absolute. Thus in chess, or other games of the 

 like nature, the first rules and laws of the play are merely 

 positive postulates, which ought to be entirely received, not 



' Hooker, EcoVjs, Polit. 



