SÉC'tION X. 579' the principles of virtue while he was a child ; and the most important truths of religion both natural andirevealed, before be was capable of deriving them from the fund of his own reason ; or of framing a religion for himself out of so large a book as the. bible. They thought themselves under the obligation of that divine command, Train up a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it ; Prov. xxii. 6. And therefore from a child they made him acquainted with the holy scriptures, and persuaded him to believe that they were given by the inspiration of God, before it was possible'forhim to take in the arguments from reason, history, tradition, &o. which must be joined together to confirm the sacred canon, and prove the several books of the bible to be divine. Thus, like Timothy, he continued in the things which he had learned,,and had been assur- ed of, knowing of whom he had learned them; 2 Tim. iii. 14, 15, 16. Yet as his years advanced, they thought it requisite to shew hin the solid and rational foundations of his faith, that his hope might be built upon the authority of God, and not of men. Thus the apostles and prophets were made his early compa- nions ; and being instructed in the proofs of the Christian reli- gion, and the divine original of his bible, he pays a more constant and sacred regard to it, since his judgment and reason assure him, that it is the word of God, than when he was a child, and believed it because his mother told him so. He reads the scrip- tures daily now, not like the lessons of his infancy, but as the infallible rule of his faith and practice ; he searches them every day in his closet, not to confirm any articles and doctrines that he is resolved to believe, but (as the noble Bereans did) to examine and try whether those doctrines and articles ought to be believed or no, which he was taught in the nursery. After he arrived at fifteen he was suffered to admit nothing into his full assent, till his mind saw the rational evidence of the proposition itself ; or at least till he felt the power of those rea- sons, which obliged him to assent upon moral evidence and testi- mony, wherethe evidences of sense or of reason were not to be. expected. He knew that he was not to hope for mathematical proofs that there is a Pope at Rome, that the Turks have domin- ion over Judea, that St. Paul wrote an epistle to the Romans, that Christ was crucified without the gates of Jerusalem, and that in three days time he rose from the dead ; and yet that there is just and reasonable evidence to enforce and support the belief of all these. Where truths are toe sublime for present comprehen- sion, he would never admit them as a part of his faith, till he saw full evidence of a speaking God, and a divine revelation. His tutor never imposed any thing on him with a magis, oo2
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