But far greater is my fear, that to a modern British auditory, trained
in the school of Locke, much of ancient thought, heathen as well as
Christian, may seem so utterly the product of the imagination, so
utterly without any corresponding reality in the universe, as to look
like mere unintelligible madness. Still, I must try; only entreating my
hearers to consider, that how much soever we may honour Locke and his
great Scotch followers, we are not bound to believe them either
infallible, or altogether world-embracing; that there have been other
methods than theirs of conceiving the Unseen; that the common ground
from which both Christian and heathen Alexandrians start, is not merely
a private vagary of their own, but one which has been accepted
undoubtingly, under so many various forms, by so many different races,
as to give something of an inductive probability that it is not a mere
dream, but may be a right and true instinct of the human mind. I mean
the belief that the things which we see--nature and all her phenomena--
are temporal, and born only to die; mere shadows of some unseen
realities, from whom their laws and life are derived; while the eternal
things which subsist without growth, decay, or change, the only real,
only truly existing things, in short, are certain things which are not
seen; inappreciable by sense, or understanding, or imagination,
perceived only by the conscience and the reason.
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