ISBN: 9781459020351

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustra… More...

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1820 edition. Excerpt: ...present, what you mean by a divine mission, before I can see the necessity of ''denying the reality of those miracles--or of granting the authority of their (Christ and his apostles) testimony;'' that is, in regard to a future state. But even if I should be made to see this, it would be of no use for the present; because as it respects the final issue of the argument, I have not, neither do 1 now admit the reality of those miracles: as you must have seen by my seventh number. The next particular which demands notice is the quoted passage which I pronounced Most excellent! Here a serious query suggests itself to my mind. I ask myself; am I, or am 1 not, as capable of writing my sentiments, so as to be understood by a rational man, as those plains illiterate men who wrote the gospels? And yet if my words are so wrested by logical twisticisms (if 1 may be allowed to use that expression) so as to mean what never entered my heart, and all this with apparent serious candor too, what may have been the fate of the writings of the evangelists? Now this is something in which I cannot be deceived; i. e. as it respects myself; for any man of common sense does know his own meaning, whether his words fully express his meaning or not,or whether they may be made to mean something else or not, Permit me therefore once more to explain. The expression, Most excellent! was not so much intended to have been applied to the sentence proceding it, as to the author, of that sentence, whose goodness, in stating so explicitly what he understands by the christian faith, I commended. And you must excuse me for not being able to see any inconsistency, absurdity, or contradiction in my words which follow that expression. Suppose a case. You have a good and faithful servant,... Hosea Ballou, Books, Religion and Spirituality, A series of letters in defence of divine revelation; in reply to Rev. Abner Kneeland's inquiry into the authenticity of Books>Religion and Spirituality <