03.01 - Chapter 1 - Summary Of The First Part Of The Foregoing System

Chapter I. Summary Of The First Part Of The Foregoing System. The commonly received systems of theology are, it is confessed by their advocates, attended with manifold inconveniences and difficulties. The habit of mind by which, notwithstanding such difficulties, it clings to the great truths of those systems, is worthy of all admiration, and forms one of the best guarantees of the stability and progress of human knowledge. For in every department of science the great truths which dawn upon the mind are usually attended with a cloud of difficulties, and, but for the habit in question, they would soon be permitted to fade away, and be lost in their original obscurity. Copernicus has, therefore, been justly applauded,(219) not only for conceiving, but for firmly grasping the heliocentric theory of the world, notwithstanding the many formidable objections which it had to encounter in his own mind. Even the sublime law of the material universe, before it finally established itself in the mind of Newton, more than once fell, in its struggles for acceptance, beneath the apparently insuperable objections by which it was attended; and, after all, the overpowering evidence which caused it to be embraced, still left it surrounded by an immense penumbra of difficulties. These, together with the sublime truth, he bequeathed to his successors. They have retained the truth, and removed the difficulties. In like manner, admirable though the habit of clinging to every sufficiently accredited truth may be, yet, whether in the physical or in the moral sciences, the effort to disencumber the truth of the difficulties by which its progress is embarrassed should never be remitted. The scientific impulse, by which a great truth is grasped, and established upon its own appropriate evidence, should ever be followed by the subordinate movement, which strives to remove every obstacle out of the way, and cause it to secure a wider and a brighter dominion in the human mind. And in proportion as any scheme, whether in relation to natural or to divine things, shall, without a sacrifice or mutilation of the truth, divest itself of the darkness which must ever accompany all one-sided and partial views, will it possess a decided advantage and superiority over other systems. Since this general principle will not be denied, let us proceed, in conclusion, to take a brief survey of the foregoing scheme of doctrine, and determine, if we can, whether to any truth it has given any such advantage.

It clearly seems free from the stupendous cloud of difficulties that overhang that view of the moral universe which supposes its entire constitution and government to be in accordance with the scheme of necessity. These difficulties pertain, first, to the responsibility of man; secondly, to the purity of God; and, thirdly, to the reality of moral distinctions. These three several branches of the difficulty in question have been respectively considered in the first three chapters of the first part of the present work; and we shall now briefly recapitulate the views therein presented, in the three following sections.