Although I learn from all this chapter, that Luther was no great
Patrician, (indeed he was better employed), yet I am nearly, if not
wholly of his mind respecting the works of the Fathers. Those which
appear to me of any great value are valuable chiefly for those articles
of Christian Faith which are, as it were, 'ante Christum' JESUM, namely,
the Trinity, and the primal Incarnation spoken of by John i, 10. But in
the main I should perhaps go even farther than Luther; for I cannot
conceive any thing more likely than that a young man of strong and
active intellect, who has no fears, or suffers no fears of worldly
prudence to cry, Halt! to him in his career of consequential logic, and
who has been 'innutritus et juratus' in the Grotio-Paleyan scheme of
Christian evidence, and who has been taught by the men and books, which
he has been bred up to regard as authority, to consider all inward
experiences as fanatical delusions;--I say, I can scarcely conceive such
a young man to make a serious study of the Fathers of the first four or
five centuries without becoming either a Romanist or a Deist. Let him
only read Petavius and the different Patristic and Ecclesiastico
-historical tracts of Semler, and have no better philosophy than that of
Locke, no better theology than that of Arminius and Bishop Jeremy
Taylor, and I should tremble for his belief. Yet why tremble for a
belief which is the very antipode of faith? Better for such a man to
precipitate himself on to the utmost goal: for then perhaps he may in
the repose of intellectual activity feel the nothingness of his prize,
or the wretchedness of it; and then perhaps the inward yearning after a
religion may make him ask;--"Have I not mistaken the road at the outset?
Am I sure that the Reformers, Luther and the rest collectively, were
fanatics?"