436
THE SAXONS IN ENGLAND.
[book I.
or charmed with the wonderful combination of de-
tails that form the perfect whole. We stand su-
preme among the subjects of our knowledge; and
the marvels of science itself will now not form the
stock in trade of a second-class conjuror. Observe
the man who threads his way with imperturbable
security and speed through the thoroughfares of
a densely-peopled metropolis : the crowd throng
about him, yet he yields here, he adʌanees there,
till at length, almost unconsciously, he has attained
the goal of his desire. IIe is familiar with the
straight lines and angles that surround him, he
measures his position and stands upright, mis-
taking, if indeed he think at all, the inconceivably
rapid calculations of the understanding for acts of
his own spontaneous volition. The unaccustomed
eye of the child cannot do this ; and he wavers in
his steps and stumbles from point to point, help-
less, but charming in his helplessness, till practice
brings him power, and he too walks and stands
upright among men. So is it ʌvith the minds of
men in early and uninstructed periods, stumbling
from belief to belief, resting for support upon every
circumstance of surrounding life, and unfurnished
with the elements of scientific reasoning, which, by
assuring certainty, destroy the vague, indefinite
basis of faith, or bring within a narrow and con-
stantly decreasing circle, its vague and indefinite
object. We believe the results of Geometry, the
theorems of analytic mathematics, because we can-
not help oursehes, cannot escape from the inevita-
CS. x∏ ]
HEATHENDOM. CONCLUSION.
437
bïe conclusion involved in the premises ; but we
cannot call this acquiescence faith, or establish
upon it a moral claim before our own conscience
and our God. And as there can be no reason save
in the unintelligible, no faith save in the impossi-
ble, all that is brought within the realm of the in-
tellect, or the sphere of the possible, is j ust so much
withdrawn from the circle of religion.
The basis of the religious state in man is the
sensation of weakness,—whether that weakness be
or be not distinctly traced in the consciousness to
the ignorance which is its cause, or to the ultimate,
more abstract and more philosophical conviction of
sinfulness, in the conscience. Man cannot rest for
his anxious desire to know the why and how of
every phænomenon he observes : this restlessness is
the law of his intellect, that is, the condition of his
humanity : he interrogates the phænomena them-
selves, but if they will give no answer to his ques-
tion, he will seek it without them. In himself he
will seek it in vain. A t no time, at no stage of his
development can he understand the relation of the
subject and the object, or comprehend the copula
that unites them. The philosopher the most deeply
trained in watching abstract forms of thought, ac-
knowledges with a sigh that even the intuitions of
the reason halt in the fetters of the understanding,
and that to give objective reality to what can be
known only in the forms and through the powers
θf the subjective, is at best to be guilty of a noble
treason to the laws of pure reasoning. And what