2 TIM. III. 16.—All Scripture is given by inspiration of LECTURE I. THE APPEAL OF CHRISTIANITY TO THE MORAL JUDGMENTS. Rom. ii. 14, 15. FOR WHEN THE GENTILES, WHICH HAVE NOT THE LAW, DO BY NATURE THE THINGS CONTAINED IN THE LAW, THESE, HAVING NOT THE LAW, ARE A LAW UNTO THEMSELVES: WHICH SHEW THE WORK OF THE LAW WRITTEN IN THEIR HEARTS, THEIR CONSCIENCE ALSO BEARING WITNESS, AND THEIR THOUGHTS THE MEANWHILE ACCUSING OR ELSE EXCUSING ONE ANOTHER. It will be generally agreed that there is not a more important or distinguishing property of our intelligent nature, by whatever name we may prefer to distinguish it, and however we may trace its growth, or analyse its principles,than that by which we approve and disapprove particular affections of our minds, or, which is morally the same thing, such actions as are perceived to flow from them; judging them to be right or wrong; that is, attributing merit or demerit to the doers of such actions, and accounting ourselves and others to be under a moral obligation to perform or forbear them. It is to our reason, in its cognizance of these moral judgments, that the Christian religion, primarily and to a great extent, appeals, in proposing itself to our belief, or claiming to be received as a revelation from the Author of our being; and it will be our endeavour to maintain the propriety and force of that appeal, to such an extent as the compass of a few discourses may allow. We do not forget that, in judging actions to be right and wrong, mankind are subject to peculiar feelings of complacency and aversion, of such a nature as to incline them to the former, and to restrain them from the latter; but we direct attention more particularly to the moral judgments, in distinction from the feelings with which they are associated, for important reasons which we shall offer in the sequel. We have stated that Christianity, as proposed to our belief, is, primarily and to a great extent, an appeal to our reason in its cognizance of our moral judgments, or our discernment of a moral distinction in our dispositions and conduct: the design of the present discourse is to establish and explain this assertion, and, moreover, to premise conditions which appear to be necessary to entitle Christianity to a serious regard and examination, under this particular description of its claims, and which actually exist to command attention to intrinsic indications of its truth and authority. That the Christian religion assumes to be credible, first and principally, in virtue of its congruity to our reason, in reference to our discernment of moral distinctions, follows at once and undeniably from the fact that it demands our belief,-demands our impartial examination of the evidences of its divine authority, -as the fulfilment of a duty to God: thus implying the most momentous of all realities, if it be one, that we are subject to a moral obligation to the Creator: that is, that we are properly objects of a moral approbation and disapprobation, capable of merit and demerit, in our affections and conduct towards HIMSELF. If this primary assumption be consistent with a just account of the moral judgments, the demand founded upon it is so far consistent with the credibility of the Christian religion. But how is this assumption to be proved? Not, it must be manifest, from the Scripture itself, whose title to belief is, by supposition, in dispute; nor from any external evidence adducible in support of the pretensions of Scripture; for the assumption in question is, not that there are sufficient proofs of the truth of Christianity, but that we stand in a relation to the Deity which renders it our duty to collect and examine them. It is unquestionable, then, that the reality of our moral obligation to the Deity is presumed in the Scripture to be deducible by human reason, or capable of proof on grounds independent of a divine revelation. It is often imputed to the divines of the last century, that they have laid an undue stress on what are called the principles of natural religion; attributing to human reason the knowledge of truths which, in reality, were derived from another source. Whether they have actually exposed themselves to this animadversion, or in what manner, it is here unnecessary to inquire; but we must take occasion to observe that those who hold such principles to be entirely superfluous, or human reason to be devoid of authority, in the article of religious belief, have erred into the opposite and, as we apprehend, a far more dangerous extreme. In maintaining the Scripture to be, exclusively, the source of religious knowledge, they abandon the only ground on which they are entitled to assert, for the Scripture itself, a claim upon the attention of mankind to assert the duty of investigating the evidence of an alleged communication from God -to assert the existence of any duty to the Creator whatsoever. As our purpose is to deal with the principles of religious duty as implied and inculcated in the Scripture, we shall at once bring forward the original and special ground, on which it is there presumed to be agreeable to our reason to con |