All men therefore are equally reasonable in this respect, that they are, and must be, by a necessity of nature, equally directed and governed by their own reason and choice.
* The dispute therefore betwixt Christians and unbelievers, concerning reason, is not, whether men are to use their own reason, any more than whether they are to see with their own eyes; but whether every man’s reason must needs guide him, by its own light, or must cease to guide him, as soon as it guides him by a light borrowed from revelation? This is the true state of the question, not whether reason is to be followed, but when it is best followed? Not whether it is to be our guide, but how it may be made our safest guide?
* The free-thinkers, therefore, rather appeal to the passions, than reason of the people, when they represent the clergy and Christianity as enemies to reason, and themselves as friends and advocates for the use of reason.
* For Christians oppose unbelievers, not because they reason, but because they reason ill. They receive revelation, not to suppress the natural power, but to give new and heavenly light to their reason; not to take away their right of judging for themselves, but to secure them from false judgments.
Christians therefore do not differ from unbelievers in the constant use of their reason, but in the manner of using it: as virtuous men differ from rakes, not in their desire of happiness, but in their manner of seeking it.
It appears from what has been said, that every man’s own reason is his only principle of action, and that he must judge according to it, whether he receives, or rejects revelation.
Now although every man is to judge according to the light of his own reason, yet his reason has very little light that can be called its own. For, as we derive our nature from our parents, so that which we generally call natural knowledge, or the light of nature, is a knowledge and light that is made natural to us, by the same authority, which makes a certain language, certain customs, and modes of behaviour, natural to us.
Nothing seems to be our own, but a bare capacity to be instructed, a nature fitted for any impressions; as liable to be made a Hottentot, by being born among Hottentots, as to be a Christian, by being born among Christians.
It is not my intention by this to signify, that there is not a good and evil, right and wrong founded in the nature of things: but only to shew, that we find out this right and wrong, not by any inward strength, that our natural reason of itself affords, but by such external means, as people are taught articulate language, or the rules of civil life.
Men do not prefer virtue to vice, from a philosophical contemplation of the fitness of the one, and the unfitness of the other; but because it is a judgment as early in their minds, as their knowledge of the words, virtue and vice.