The next thing discovered, is an opinion about the assurance of men's
persuasion in matters of faith. I have taught, he saith, 'That the
assurance of things which we believe by the word, is not so certain as
of that we perceive by sense.'

A useful instance to illustrate the importance of distinct, and the
mischief of equivocal or multivocal, terms. Had Hooker said that the
fundamental truths of religion, though perhaps even more certain, are
less evident than the facts of sense, there could have been no
misunderstanding. Thus the demonstrations of algebra possess equal
certainty with those of geometry, but cannot lay claim to the same
evidence. Certainty is positive, evidence relative; the former, strictly
taken, insusceptible of more or less, the latter capable of existing in
many different degrees.

Writing a year or more after the preceding note, I am sorry to say that
Hooker's reasoning on this point seems to me sophistical throughout.
That a man must see what he sees is no persuasion at all, nor bears the
remotest analogy to any judgment of the mind. The question is, whether
men have a clearer conception and a more stedfast conviction of the
objective reality to which the image moving their eye appertains, than
of the objective reality of the things and states spiritually discovered
by faith. And this Travers had a right to question wherever a saving
faith existed.

August, 1826.



SERMON IV. A REMEDY AGAINST SORROW AND FEAR.