The Christian Evidences are an essential part of the course of
religious study prescribed at Oxford, and they had engaged from an
early period a large share of my attention. Each treatise on the
subject, taken by itself, appeared to me to have great argumentative
force; but when I tried to grasp them all together in a higher act
of thought, I was sensible of a certain confusion, and inability to
reconcile their fundamental assumptions. _One_ either formally
stated, or virtually assumed, that the deepest basis of all
religious knowledge was the testimony of sense to some fact, which is
ascertained to be miraculous when examined by the light of Physics or
Physiology; and that we must, at least in a great degree, distrust and
abandon our moral convictions or auguries, at the bidding of sensible
miracle. _Another_ treatise assumed that men's moral feelings and
beliefs are, on the whole, the most trustworthy thing to be found;
and starting from them as from a known and ascertained foundation,
proceeded to glorify Christianity because of its expanding,
strengthening, and beautifying all that we know by conscience to be
morally right. That the former argument, if ever so valid, was still
too learned and scholastic, not for the vulgar only, but for every man
in his times of moral trial, I felt instinctively persuaded: yet my
intellect could not wholly dispense with it, and my belief in the
depravity of the moral understanding of men inclined me to go some way
in defending it. To endeavour to combine the two arguments by saying
that they were adapted to different states of mind, was plausible;
yet it conceded, that neither of the two went to the bottom of
human thought, or showed what were the real _fixed points_ of man's
knowledge; without knowing which, we are in perpetual danger of mere
_argumentum ad hominem_, or, in fact, arguing in a circle;--as to
prove miracles from doctrine, and doctrine from miracles. I however