Well! I could most sincerely subscribe to all these articles.

September, 1831.




NOTES ON HOOKER. [1]


'LIFE OF HOOKER' BY WALTON.

p. 67.

Mr. Travers excepted against Mr. Hooker, for that in one of his
sermons he declared, 'That the assurance of what we believe by the
word of God, is not to us so certain as that which we perceive by
sense.' And Mr. Hooker confesseth he said so, and endeavours to
justify it by the reasons following.

There is, I confess, a shade of doubt on my mind as to this position of
Hooker's. Yet I do not deny that it expresses a truth. The question in
my mind is, only, whether it adequately expresses the whole truth. The
ground of my doubt lies in my inability to compare two things that
differ in kind. It is impossible that any conviction of the reason, even
where no act of the will advenes as a co-efficient, should possess the
vividness of an immediate object of the senses; for the vividness is
given by sensation. Equally impossible is it that any truth of the
super-sensuous reason should possess the evidence of the pure sense.