Shall we know its danger; then we
must know its deeds.
III. OF RATIONALISM IT MAY BE AFFIRMED, AS OF ALL THE PHASES OF
INFIDELITY, THAT IT IS NOT IN ITS RESULTS AN UNMIXED EVIL, SINCE GOD
OVERRULES ITS WORK FOR THE PURIFICATION AND PROGRESS OF HIS CHURCH. A
nation is never so pure as when emerging from the sevenfold-heated
furnace. It was not before Manasseh was caught among thorns, bound with
fetters, and carried to Babylon, that he "besought the Lord his God, and
humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers;" nor was it
before this humiliation that the Lord "brought him again to Jerusalem
into his kingdom." The whole history of religious error shows that the
church is cold, formal, and controversial before the visitation of
skepticism. When every power is in full exercise, infidelity stands
aloof. God has so provided for his people that he has even caused the
delusion by which they have suffered to contribute great benefits but
little anticipated by the deluded or the deluders themselves. The
intellectual labors of the German Rationalists have already shed an
incalculable degree of light on the sacred books, and upon almost every
branch of theology.
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