his present condition, or in his present in relation to his future
condition,--as an inhabitant only of this world, or a candidate for
another; and to this law, by a series of analogies as striking as any
of those which Butler has pointed out (and on which we heartily wish his
comprehensive genius had expended a chapter or two), Christianity,
in the demands it makes on both principles conjointly, is evidently
adapted.

Men often speak, indeed, as if the exercise of faith was excluded from
their condition as inhabitants of the present world. But it requires
but a very slight consideration to show that the boasted prerogative of
reason is here also that of a limited monarch; and that its attempts to
make itself absolute can only end in its own dethronement, and, after
successive revolutions, in all the anarchy of absolute pyrrhonism.

For in the intellectual and moral education of man, considered merely
as a citizen of the present world, we see the constant and inseparable
union of the two principles, and provision made for their perpetual
exercise. He cannot advance a step, indeed without both. We see faith
demanded not only amidst the dependence and ignorance in which childhood
and youth are passed; not only in the whole process by which we acquire
the imperfect knowledge which is to fit us for being men; but to
the very last we may be truly said to believe far more than we know.
'Indeed,' said Butler, 'the unsatisfactory nature of the evidence with
which we are obliged to take up in the daily course of life, is scarce
to be expected.' Nay, in an intelligible sense, even the 'primary
truths,' or 'first principles,' or 'fundamental laws of thought,' or
'self-evident maxims,' or 'intuitions,' or by whatever other names
philosophers have been pleased to designate them, which, in a special
sense, are the very province of reason, as contra-distinguished from