Posthumous Works of the Rev. Thomas Chalmers, D.D., LL. D, Vol. 8 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Posthumous Works of the Rev. Thomas Chalmers, D.D., LL. D, Vol. 8

On the necessity of a revelation fromheaven, engages im mediately with the proof of it. If true, it was an event, an historical event; and therefore he casts about for its histor ical evidences. This is safer ground certainly than that on which many a speculator has ventured to expatiate, more especially when, intruding into things not seen, he founds his argument on his own conjectural imaginations of the best and most befitting policy for the Godhead. It is not for the philosopher's but for the poet's eye to glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven and as imagination bodies forth the ferm of things unknown, it is the poet's pen which turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. Theological authorship is peopled with the embodied forms of things unknown and many are the airy nothings which have found a name and local habitation there. It were a great achievement to find Out the principle, and make a thorough application of it, on which to separate the legitimate from the transcendental so as to mark off the terra'cognita of human thought'from that remote and hypothetical region, in which spirits of a certain lofty and ambitious cast so delight to luxuriate. Thus to restrain inquiry within its proper boundaries, and give a right direction to it, would require a naoum organum for our science, wherein to fix and define what maybe termed the logic of theology, to limit and lay on its own rightful foundation the philosophy ofthe Christian argument. 3. I have often aflirmed in your hearing, that in no science and no subject of human contemplation, has the spirit of hypothesis dared more presumptuously, or wantoned more licentiousl y, than in our own and yet surely on every prinr ciple of philosophy, there cannot be named a territory of thought where the humble diffidence and docility of little children are more imperiously called for. 'when we think' of the eternity before, and on the still more baffling mystery of the eternity behind us - when we think of the wondrous God who unites both, and comprehends both - when we think of the universe on which He' sits enthroned, stretch -ing far beyond the ken of human'eye, onward and outward.

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