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I gave up belief in the miraculous and supernatural in the Bible for conscience' sake. But after the rationalists had driven me to this bitter end, through my sensitive conscience, I was gravely informed that conscience was a mere creature of education and therefore should only be followed conditionally.
When the pagan looks at the very core of the cosmos he is struck cold. Behind the gods, who are merely despotic, sit the fates, who are deadly. Nay, the fates are worse than deadly; they are dead. And when rationalists say that the ancient world was more enlightened than the Christian, from their point of view they are right.
It is fought on theological grounds by clerics who quote the first chapter of Genesis; and on anti-theological grounds by half-instructed rationalists who attack marriage because they suppose it was invented by the Church. And whose voices never fail among the disputants?
Let us ask you rationalists, if man, as a reasonable being, is not accountable for his actions, and let us put the same question to you, who have studied the divine writings?
They call us Rationalists; take care you don't fall into Liberalism. And now, my dearest Carlton, my one friend in Oxford who was patient and loving towards me, good-bye. May we meet not long hence in peace and joy. I cannot go to you; you must come to me." They embraced each other affectionately; and the next minute Charles was running down the staircase.
On the other hand, it has not hesitated, when occasion required, to make very light of the intuitive beliefs of the popular mind as interpreted by itself. Thus, rationalists of the Platonic type have not shrunk from pronouncing individual impressions and objects illusory, an assertion which certainly seems to be opposed to the assumptions of common sense, if not to those of science.
Not one of these churches, say the Rationalists, not one of the clergymen who minister therein, not one single village school in all England, but must be regarded as a fountain of error, if not of deliberate falsehood. Look where they may, they cannot escape from the signs of a vital belief in the Resurrection.
Again, when the invalid took the medicine, an incantation had to be said which began thus: "Come remedy, come drive it out of my heart, out of these limbs strong in magic power with the remedy." He adds: "There may have been a few rationalists amongst the Egyptian doctors, for the number of magic formulae varies much in the different books.
It has now become possible to decide with some confidence as to the truth or falsehood of these opposing schools. It must be admitted, for the reasons already stated, that logical principles are known to us, and cannot be themselves proved by experience, since all proof presupposes them. In this, therefore, which was the most important point of the controversy, the rationalists were in the right.
In his religious ideas the Abbe differed from Voltaire and the later social philosophers in one important respect, but this very difference was a consequence of his utilitarianism. Like them he was a Deist, as we saw; he had imbibed the spirit of Bayle and the doctrine of the English rationalists, which were penetrating French society during the later part of his life.
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