will, and the scientific reason, we must either have an innate idea of
them, which would overthrow the whole system; or we can have no idea
at all. The process, by which Hume degraded the notion of cause and
effect into a blind product of delusion and habit, into the mere
sensation of proceeding life (nisus vitalis) associated with the
images of the memory; this same process must be repeated to the equal
degradation of every fundamental idea in ethics or theology.

Far, very far am I from burthening with the odium of these
consequences the moral characters of those who first formed, or have
since adopted the system! It is most noticeable of the excellent and
pious Hartley, that, in the proofs of the existence and attributes of
God, with which his second volume commences, he makes no reference to
the principle or results of the first. Nay, he assumes, as his
foundations, ideas which, if we embrace the doctrines of his first
volume, can exist no where but in the vibrations of the ethereal
medium common to the nerves and to the atmosphere. Indeed the whole of
the second volume is, with the fewest possible exceptions, independent
of his peculiar system. So true is it, that the faith, which saves and
sanctifies, is a collective energy, a total act of the whole moral
being; that its living sensorium is in the heart; and that no errors
of the understanding can be morally arraigned unless they have
proceeded from the heart. But whether they be such, no man can be
certain in the case of another, scarcely perhaps even in his own.
Hence it follows by inevitable consequence, that man may perchance
determine what is a heresy; but God only can know who is a heretic. It
does not, however, by any means follow that opinions fundamentally
false are harmless. A hundred causes may co-exist to form one complex
antidote. Yet the sting of the adder remains venomous, though there
are many who have taken up the evil thing, and it hurted them not.