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Of course, you don't agree with me! Of course you've got another objection all ready to bowl me down with?" "Rationalism," said Mr. Thorpe, still looking steadily at the lithographed portrait of the Reverend Aaron Yollop. "Well, your objection's a short one this time at any rate; and that's a blessing!" said the old gentleman rather irritably. "Rationalism eh?
Discerning critics cannot fail to see that much of the drift toward denominational union is due to the leadership of preachers who, through rationalism, have lost faith in the inspiration of the Bible and consequently in evangelical Christianity.
This is the tradition known as rationalism in philosophy, and what I have called intellectualism is only the extreme application of it. In spite of sceptics and empiricists, in spite of Protagoras, Hume, and James Mill, rationalism has never been seriously questioned, for its sharpest critics have always had a tender place in their hearts for it, and have obeyed some of its mandates.
Quite naturally, too, the first gropings after a scientific theory of disease show a curious mixture of rationalism and superstition. Thus, in Greece, the temple hospitals devoted to the mythical Æsculapius, which were situated at Epidaurus, Pergamus, Cyrene, Corinth, and many other places, served as colleges, hospitals, and places of worship.
'Unitarianism, said shrewd old Erasmus Darwin, 'is a feather-bed for a dying Christian. But at present such men as Priestley and Price were only so far on the road to a thorough rationalism as to denounce the corruptions of Christianity, as they denounced abuses in politics, without anticipating a revolutionary change in church and state.
The paltry discussions of scholasticism, the dryness of spirit of Descartes, the deep-rooted irreligion of the eighteenth century, by lessening God, and by limiting Him, in a manner, by the exclusion of everything which is not His very self, have stifled in the breast of modern rationalism all fertile ideas of the Divinity.
It has perhaps not been generally observed that just as the virtuous agnostic is generally the child of Christian parents, so by a seeming irony he is often found to be the father of Christian children: there is hardly a genuine case on record where "free-thought," Agnosticism, Rationalism, has descended from parents to children to the third or fourth generation without a break, and the practical non-existence of such cases proves something of real and great importance.
I hungered after great truths: Middlemarch, Adam Bede, The Rise and Influence of Rationalism, The History of Civilisation, were momentous events in my life. But I loved life better than books, and very curiously my studies and my pleasures kept pace, stepping together like a pair of well-trained carriage horses.
For some time past the words "Rationalism" and "Rationalistic" have been freely used as terms of reproach by writers on religious subjects; the 73d No. of the "Tracts for the Times" is entitled, "On the introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Religion," and a whole chapter in Mr. Gladstone's late work on Church Principles is headed "Rationalism."
She was the very impersonation of that obstinate rationalism that grew up at the New-England fireside, close alongside of the most undoubting faith in the supernatural. "I don't believe such things," at last she snapped out, "and I don't disbelieve them. I just let 'em alone. What do I know about 'em? Ruth tells me a story; and I believe her.
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