We are aware that the more learned among those who disbelieve in the
divinity of Christ suppose themselves to be sustained by written
authority, contending for errors of translation, mistakes and
misapprehensions in the ancient texts. Nevertheless, we are inclined to
think that nine-tenths of those who refuse the old and accept the new
opinion, do so for a motive no better than a disinclination to believe
that which they cannot comprehend. This pride of reason is one of the most
insinuating of our foibles, and is to be watched as a most potent enemy.

How completely and philosophically does the venerable Christian creed
embrace and modify all these workings of the heart! We say
philosophically, for it were not possible for mind to give a juster
analysis of the whole subject than St. Paul's most comprehensive but brief
definition of Faith. It is this Faith which forms the mighty feature of
the church on earth. It equalizes capacities, conditions, means, and ends,
holding out the same encouragement and hope to the least, as to the most
gifted of the race; counting gifts in their ordinary and more secular
points of view.

It is when health, or the usual means of success abandon us, that we are
made to feel how totally we are insufficient for the achievement of even
our own purposes, much less to qualify us to reason on the deep mysteries
that conceal the beginning and the end. It has often been said that the
most successful leaders of their fellow men have had the clearest views of
their own insufficiency to attain their own objects. If Napoleon ever
said, as has been attributed to him, "_Je propose et je dispose_," it must
have been in one of those fleeting moments in which success blinded him to
the fact of his own insufficiency. No man had a deeper reliance on
fortune, cast the result of great events on the decrees of fate, or more
anxiously watched the rising and setting of what he called his "star."