You must limit
your observations to what is done, and not dream of a Doer. You may see
things tending to the diffusion of happiness, but must not suppose that
there is a great unseen Benefactor, who gives them this blessed
tendency. And if you feel in yourself a disposition to gratitude, you
must treat it as a foolish, childish fancy, and suppress it as
irrational.
A sillier or a more contemptible notion--a notion more opposed to true
philosophy and common sense,--can hardly be conceived. How any one could
ever have the ignorance or the impudence to propound such an unnatural
and monstrous absurdity as a great philosophical principle, would be a
mystery, if we did not know how infidelity perverts men's
understandings, and, while puffing them up with infinite conceit of
their own wisdom, transforms them into the most arrant and outrageous
fools.
Yet this monstrous folly has found its way into books, and papers, and
reviews, and, through them, into the minds of some Christian students;
and when the madness of the notion is not detected, it destroys their
faith, and makes them miserable infidels.
Some adopt the principle that reason is man's only guide,--that reason
alone is judge of what is true and good, and that to reason every thing
must be submitted, and received or rejected, done or left undone, as
reason may decide.
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