fully adequate to the purpose for which you use it. It might not be a
reasonable, a necessary disposition of property for the proposed
benefactor, to give you a large estate; it might be, in the eye of
reason a very improper donation, and one which would deprive
legitimate heirs of what they had a right to expect from a father
towards whom they had always acted with filial obedience.--But if you
will make the case a parallel, and suppose you are an heir, a lawful
child, and your father has a large estate to dispose of, then you will
see that it is right and just, and no more than what you have reason
to expect; that it is necessary, and that this necessity is the
importance of the subject, you will at once see that this importance
is a reason, yea an evidence that you have a right to expect it. I
called on you to prove that no revelation was needed; I acknowledged
that if none was necessary, a being of infinite wisdom would make
none. You venture to say, that the "only evidence that reason can have
of the necessity of divine revelation is its truth." It is believed,
sir, that this hypothesis involves too much. It is saying that reason
can discern the necessity of nothing until it obtains it, whereas the
truth is evidently the other side of the assertion. We are frequently
experiencing the necessity of things which we have not already
attained, and by this want we are incited to use the means by which we
finally obtain them.--"Ask, and ye shall receive, seek, and ye shall
find, knock, and it shall be opened unto you," &c. It is believed, and
no doubt it may be argued with success, that the moral and religious
state of man really required a divine revelation. Never did the
parched ground, the withering plant, the thirsty herds need the
showers from heaven, more than man, that WORD of life which descended
as the rain and distilled as the dew, when the gospel was published by
a cloud of faithful witnesses, called of God for that purpose.