Here, too, it is questioned, and not without cause, whether the
satisfaction and comfort so often represented in warm and fascinating
colours, be really a spiritual blessing; or whether it be not a
deception and fallacy, frequently ending in lamentable perplexity and
confusion; like guarantees in secular concerns, which as long as they
maintain unsuspected credit afford a most pleasing and happy security to
any one who depends upon them; but which, when adverse fortune puts
their responsibility to the test, may prove utterly worthless, and be
traced only by losses and disappointments. Such a blind reliance on
authority may doubtless be more easy and more free from care, than it is
to gird up the loins of our mind, and engage in toilsome spiritual
labour. But with a view to our own ultimate safety, wisdom bids us look
to our foundations in time, and assure ourselves {9} of them;
admonishing us that if they are unsound, the spiritual edifice reared
upon them, however pleasing to the eye, or abounding in present
enjoyments, will at length fall, and bury our hopes in its ruin.

On these and similar principles, we maintain that it well becomes
Christians, when the soundness of their faith, and the rectitude of
their acts of worship, are called in question, "to prove all things, and
hold fast that which is good." Thus, when the unbeliever charges us with
credulity in receiving as a divine revelation what he scornfully
rejects, it behoves us all (every one to the extent of his means and
opportunities) to possess ourselves of the accumulated evidences of our
holy faith, so that we may be able to give to our own minds, and to
those who ask it of us, a reason for our hope. The result can assuredly
be only the comfort of a still more unshaken conviction. Thus, too, when
the misbeliever charges us with an undue and an unauthorized ascription
of the Divine attributes to our Redeemer and to our Sanctifier, which he