which unavoidable haste, prejudice, and ignorance may have incorporated
with the gold of the edifice, will be consumed by the fire which 'will
try every man's work of what sort it is,' but he himself will be saved
amidst those purifying flames. Like the bark which contained the Apostle
and the fortunes of the Gospel, the frail vessel may go to pieces on
the rocks, 'but by boat or plank' the voyager himself shall 'get safe to
shore.'

It is amply sufficient, then, to lighten our responsibility, that we are
answerable only for our honest endeavours to discover and to practise
the truth; and, in fact, the responsibility is principally felt to be
irksome, and man is so prompt by devices of his own, to release himself
from it, not on account of any intrinsic difficulty which remains after
the above limitations are admitted, but because he wishes to be exempt
from that very necessity of patient and honest investigation. It is not
so much the difficulty of finding, as the trouble of seeking the truth,
from which he shrinks; a necessity, however, from which, as it is an
essential instrument of his moral education and discipline, he can never
be released.

If the previous representations be true, the conditions of that
intelligent faith which God requires from his intelligent offspring,
may be fairly inferred to be such as we have already stated;--that the
evidence for the truths we are to believe shall be, first, such as our
faculties are competent to appreciate, and against which, therefore, the
mere negative argument arising from our ignorance of the true solution
of such difficulties, as are, perhaps, insoluble because we are finite,
can be no reply; and, secondly, such an amount of this evidence as shall
fairly overbalance all the objections which we can appreciate. This is
the condition to which God has obviously subjected us as inhabitants of