Faith and Rationalism Author:George Park Fisher Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: scientific analysis ! The real drift of Locke's political theory comes out in the Contrat Social of Rousseau. It has been well described as a kind of adventurous... more » courage in Paley, whose mental power was less than that of Locke, but whose general tone of feeling was similar, to go forth against the opponents of Christianity, demanding of them no concession except that a revelation of a future state of rewards and punishments " is not improbable, or not improbable in any great degree." But this admission, which is all that Paley calls for in his " Preparatory Considerations," does not suffice, in point of fact, in numerous instances, to impart a convincing efficacy to his argument, notwithstanding the masterly skill and unrivaled perspicuity with which he has presented it. It is a curious and instructive fact that the founders of modern Socinianism were extreme supernaturalists. Their tendency was to attribute our knowledge of religion almost exclusively to Revelation, and to make the one proof of Revelation miracles. Some of the Socinian leaders in Poland found no valid evidence of the being of God except in Scripture. The fact of a future life was made to rest, in the same way, wholly on the testimony of the Bible. On this theory, we become acquainted with religion as we learn the existence and geographical features of an unknown continent, by no other means than through information brought to us by a credible traveler. The principle of authority, which has its rightful place among the bases of belief, is made the all in all. Religion is something imported into the soul by instruction duly authenticated; not a slumbering life waked up within us by a supernatural approach. This character of the old Socinianism shows how extremes meet. The rebound to entire disbelief in Revelatio...« less