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by faith, and then to examine it, seems to me absurd. I cannot believe 
any more than I can comprehend and understand. Mr. Poyer says he can 
accept St. Paul’s Cathedral synthetically. Now I accept as much as I see ; 
and if you ask me for details, I must see them before I have any faith in 
them. Now the Bible is presented to us as a revelation, just as the 
great facts of nature are ; but many of the facts of nature are appa- 
rently deceptive ; they come to us apparently saying that which they do 
not mean. Is it not true that the first believers in astronomy had good 
reason for saying that the sun went round the earth ? Yet they were wrong, 
although they founded their belief on a fair interpretation of facts which were 
before them. Just in the same way many other facts were presented to the 
first believers, and they made true or false interpretations of them according 
to the facts and circumstances of which they had knowledge. But it appears 
to me that the Bible, with regard to all moral truth, contains in itself its own 
interpretation, while in regard to physical truth it should be interpreted 
by the facts of external nature, which should be taken with it as enlarging 
our views of the Divine Being, and giving us facts which we could not other- 
wise have got at. 
Rev. Dr. Rigg. — I feel very much obliged to Mr. Row for this very valuable 
paper. It appears to me that Mr. Row has made some effort — but I do not mean 
to minify it, — I will say a comparatively successful effort, towards supplying 
that which Dean Mansel should have supplied in his Bampton Lectures, but 
did not. As far as I understand it, this is a sketch of the argument before 
us in its main propositions : That faith and reason are mutually inclusive ; 
that, in fact, justly understood, they, imply each other ; that faith and reason 
coalesce, even with regard to the objects of the two respectively ; that the 
infinite is equally, in a just sense, the object of faith and the object of reason ; 
that those two — faith and reason — are to be harmonized eventually upon 
the basis of induction ; and that the basis of induction is the only basis on 
which we can attain clear and articulate harmony between faith and reason 
in their respective definitions, objects, and spheres. That is the general 
scope, as I understand it, of Mr. Row’s paper 
Dr. Irons. — Are you right in saying that the reason can recognize the 
infinite, according to Mr. Row’s paper ? 
Dr. Rigg. — In a just sense, I so understand it. 
Mr. Row. — My paper simply questions the possibility of obtaining a quan- 
titative sense of infinity, but not any other sense. 
Dr. Rigg. — I think I have given the scope of the paper as to faith and 
reason in their respective spheres and definitions. Confusion always arises 
from our want of defining the different senses in which we use the word faith. 
Now all reason has for its basis some faith, but the highest faith has for its 
basis much reason. I think Coleridge made great confusion by the way in 
which he used the word reason. He used the word to signify everything he 
conceived to be accepted by the heart or by intuitions ; and hence he held 
that that initial faith which lies at the root of vision, and at the root of every 
exercise of sense ; that that faith which lies at the root of every intellectual 
