内容简介：
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE II. ON THE GROUNDS OF FAITH WHICH SCRIPTURE ITSELF AFFORDS?THE CANON OF SCRIPTURE INQUIRED INTO ON ABSTRACT AND GENERAL PRINCIPLES. 1 Peter iii. 15. Se ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you. IX. J.N my last Discourse, I stated to you the leading principle which I purpose to vindicate. That the evidence of the Gospel should be thought to depend, in a great degree, on the deference of ignorance to the testimony of learning: involves a view of the subject, respecting which I then declared my conviction, that it was both mistaken and injurious. It must now be my endeavour to substantiate that conviction for the satisfaction of others. I am to shew then, that the proofs of Christianity are not of this nature: that they do not, on the one hand, require those enlarged measures of knowledge which few can obtain; nor, on the other, any implicit submission, on the part of those who cannot obtain them, to the authority of others: but that they are equally adapted to every condition of a reasonable being in the enjoyment of his reason, and that they demand not such external or acquired advantages as are inconsistent with any ordinary condition of society. In fact, my object is to shew, that the Gospel, not only in the tendency of its discoveries and its precepts, but also in the proofs of its authority; is fully and wonderfully adapted to the state of human life. This view I deem it necessary to maintain: such necessity arising, not only from the paramount obligation of vindicating truth, but also from a sense of the inconvenience which appears to me to connect itself with the principle to which I object. For if this latter principle be admitted, I fear it must follow as an inference, that the Gospel is not ad...