For he that asserts the sufficiency of reason, to guide men in matters of religion, is not only without any positive proof from experience on his side, but has the history of all ages, for near six thousand years, fully demonstrating the quite contrary.
If some other enquirers into human nature, should affirm, that there is in mankind a natural instinct, sufficient to make every man, at all times, love every other man, with the same degree of affection, as he loves himself; I suppose such an opinion would be thought too absurd to need any confutation. And yet all the absurdity of it would lie in this, that it affirmed something of the sufficiency of a natural quality in man, which could not be supported by a single instance of any one man, and was contrary to the experience and history of every age of the world.
Now this is exactly the case of these gentlemen: their opinion has neither more or less absurdity in it: they only affirm such a sufficiency of reason to be natural to all men, as cannot be supported by a single instance of any one man, that ever lived, and is fully contradicted by the experience and history of every age since the creation of the world.
By what has been said, I hope the reader will observe, that this enquiry about the perfection or imperfection, the strength or weakness, of reason in man, as to matters of religion, rests wholly upon fact and experience; and that therefore all speculative reasonings upon it, are as idle and visionary, as a sick man’s dreams about health; and are as wholly to be rejected, as any speculative arguments that should pretend to prove, in spite of all facts and experience, the immortality, and unalterable state of human bodies.
Our author himself seems sensible, that the argument drawn from facts and experience, pressed hard upon his cause; and therefore has given the best answer to it, he can yet think of.
“It cannot, says he, be imputed to any defect in the light of nature, that the Pagan world ran into idolatry; but to their being entirely governed by priests, who pretended communication with their gods, and to have thence their revelations, which they imposed upon the credulous, as divine oracles.”
The justness of this assertion will fully appear by the following illustration.
“It cannot be imputed to any defect in the health and soundness of man’s natural constitution, that the world has, in all ages, been over-run with distempers; but to their being entirely governed by physicians, who pretended to I know not what secret knowledge of medicines, which they imposed upon the sickly, as infallible remedies.”
For, as a perfect state of health, conscious to itself of a sufficiency of natural strength to keep clear of all diseases, seems to be out of all danger from physicians; so had mankind been ever conscious to themselves, of a sufficient natural knowledge of what is true or false in religion; such as enabled men of the meanest capacity to distinguish between religion and superstition,[¹] what room had there been for frauds and impostures herein?
[¹] Page 3.