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amount of incertitude in a given subject forms no barrier to reason, and is 
no ground for reason herself being cast, as it were, from her own throne. 
On the contrary, the more incertitude there is in a subject the grander is the 
field for the exercise of reason, unless, indeed, you can show that the incerti- 
tude amounts to what may be called indeterminateness in the subject. If it 
amount to what I call indeterminateness, then no doubt reason utterly fails, 
but that is as true of science as of religion. No doubt there are many 
propositions in religion which unassisted reason utterly fails to explain and 
demonstrate, and we are not ashamed to own it ; for instance, who can 
explain, however clear his conception may seem to be, that great doctrine 
of the Christian religion — the eternal generation of the Son of God ? 
This of itself, though most important as a doctrine, is clearly what I have 
called indeterminate, and what others, perhaps, would prefer to term 
transcendental, so that reason cannot explain it. That one person can be 
begotten of another, and yet be equally eternal with the begetting 
person, is a proposition in respect of which reason fails, the moment 
you try to criticise, analyse, scrutinize, and pass judgment upon 
it. We may say the same of science. There are certain ultimate 
facts beyond which reason cannot penetrate, as, for example, the 
arrangement of molecular atoms. We can work out the laws which govern 
those arrangements in crystallization, in chemistry, and in other branches of 
science ; but when you come to ask why, out of an acorn there should 
spring the oak, and from other seed the larch, the fir, the cabbage, or 
the turnip, you come to indeterminateness. So it is in religion, and therefore 
I say that there are limits, both in science and in religion, to the exercise of 
reason. Both are on common ground, and one has no right to attack the 
other as inferior in that respect. But when we get beyond to other questions, 
however great the incertitude, there is a sphere for reasoning, especially if 
the facts have antecedents and consequents. To say religion is not a mass 
of facts with antecedents and consequents is absurd : we should deny our 
whole convictions and consciousness. The whole of the text of the Apostles’ 
Creed — the creed of the Church from which our Christianity is evolved — is 
nothing more nor less than a mass of facts — historical facts, which, if true, 
may be reasoned about. Anything in religion having these antecedents and 
consequents arising out of facts is surely fair ground for the exercise of the 
reasoning faculty. Take the existence of the Jews., They lived in the time 
of Christ. We know it as a fact that Pontius Pilate was a Roman governor 
in Palestine. We know it from Pliny, and Tacitus, and others, that the 
Jews existed there, that the Romans had conquered the country and 
colonized it, and that the facts of the Scriptures are more or less the facts 
they recognized and had to deal with. There are antecedents and consequents 
to these facts ; and one antecedent in the Scriptures is the prophecy that the 
race should be scattered throughout the world among all nations, and suffer 
the most tremendous privations and persecutions. Whether the twenty- 
eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, in which these curses are first found, was 
written by Moses, or by some unknown person in the days of Jeremiah, is 
