of Paul on the other: while at the same time it weakens the more important half of the objection to, or doubt concerning, the authenticity of St. Peter's Epistles. To this too I attach a high controversial value (for the beauty and excellence of the Epistles themselves are not affected by the question); and I receive them as authentic, for they have all the circumstantial evidence that I have any right to expect. But I feel how much more genial my conviction would become, should I discover, or have pointed out to me, any positive internal evidence equivalent to that which determines the date of the Epistle to the Hebrews, or even to that which leaves no doubt on my mind that the writer was an Alexandrian Jew. This, my dear Lamb, is one of the advantages which the previous evidence supplied by the reason and the conscience secures for us. We learn what in its nature
passes all understanding
, and what belongs to the understanding, and on which, therefore, the understanding may and ought to act freely and fearlessly: while those who will admit nothing above the understanding
which in its nature has no legitimate object but history and outward
phœnomena
, stand in slavish dread like a child at its house of cards, lest a single card removed may endanger the whole foundationless edifice. 1819.
Ib.
s. xcii. p. 365.
Now here dear Jeremy Taylor begins to be himself again; for with all his astonishing complexity, yet versatile agility, of powers, he was too good and of too catholic a spirit to be a good polemic. Hence he so continually is now breaking, now varying, the thread of the argument: and hence he is so again and again forgetting that he is reasoning against an antagonist, and falls into conversation with him as a friend, — I might almost say, into the literary chit-chat and un with holding frankness of a rich genius whose sands are seed-pearl. Of his controversies, those against Popery are the most powerful, because there he had subtleties and obscure reading to contend against; and his wit, acuteness, and omnifarious learning found stuff to work on. Those on Original Sin are the most eloquent. But in all alike it is the digressions, overgrowths, parenthetic