CHAPTER I - NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION—THE CHARACTER OF GOD

Summary

SECT. I.—ADVANTAGE OF HARMONIZING NATURE AND REVELATION.

At the close of our extensive survey, it may be useful to collect into a few heads the results which we have been able to gather in our progress. If in the discussions in which we were engaged in the first Book:, we felt ourselves merely, as it were, in the vestibule; we now, after having passed through the temple, feel ourselves to be entering the chancel, the holiest of all. Here we would seek to have God himself communing with us in a supernatural way, to clear up doubts and mysteries. “When I thought to know this, it was labour in mine eyes, until I went into the sanctuary.”

One of the objects contemplated in this Treatise has been the spiritualizing of nature, which has been so carnalized by many, and in sanctifying it, to bring it into communion with religion.

We have often mourned over the attempts made to set the works against the word of God, and thereby excite, propagate, and perpetuate jealousies, fitted to separate parties that ought to live in closest union. In particular, we have always re- gretted that endeavours should have been made to depreciate nature, with the view of exalting revelation; it has always appeared to us, to be nothing else than the degrading of one part of God's works, in the hope thereby of exalting and recommending another.