Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed by Francis William Newman
page 97 of 295 (32%)
page 97 of 295 (32%)
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therefore, that our moral faculties are not to judge, is to annihilate
the evidences for Christianity.--Thus, finally, I was lodged in three inevitable conclusions: 1. The moral and intellectual powers of man must be acknowledged as having a right and duty to criticize the contents of the Scripture: 2. When so exerted, they condemn portions of the Scripture as erroneous and immoral: 3. The assumed infallibility of the _entire_ Scripture is a proved falsity, not merely as to physiology, and other scientific matters, but also as to morals: and it remains for farther inquiry how to discriminate the trustworthy from the untrustworthy within the limits of the Bible itself. * * * * * When distinctly conscious, after long efforts to evade it, that this was and must henceforth be my position, I ruminated on the many auguries which had been made concerning me by frightened friends. "You will become a Socinian," had been said of me even at Oxford: "You will become an infidel," had since been added. My present results, I was aware, would seem a sadly triumphant confirmation to the clearsighted instinct of orthodoxy. But the animus of such prophecies had always made me indignant, and I could not admit that there was any merit in such clearsightedness. What! (used I to say,) will you shrink from truth, lest it lead to error? If following truth must bring us to Socinianism, let us by all means become Socinians, or anything else. Surely we do not love our doctrines more than the truth, but because |
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