Excerpt from A Sketch of the Rise and Progress of Christianity The treatment of Christian Theology has hitherto oscillated between church authority and individual impulse and feeling. Reason has throughout played only an incidental and secondary part. The early misapplication of it in the endeavour to de termine, by way of speculative inference, the essential nature of the Deity, could end only in discomfiture. The Trinitarian controversy of the first centuries was a hopeless entanglement, in which the mind, driven from point to point by its own ingenuity, eventually registered the utterances of its torture and despair in the unintelligible jargon of the Athanasian Creed. Reawakening after a long interval, it returned once more to grapple with the Creed or established articles of dogma which had obtained undisputed possession of the Chris tian mind during the middle ages. But this new attempt turned out as unfortunately as the former one 3 and, so far from establishing a satisfactory alliance between faith and reason, produced their formal, and, it would seem, final separation. The only remaining alternative was that of an unmitigated dogmatism, or, if individual judgment were appealed to, an appeal strictly limited to Scripture and to feeling. A mystical coalition between the received dogma and the internal senti ments was still possible; if a man could not prove the truth of his position, he might at least feel himself to be in the right; the dogma might be arbitrarily limited to meet the feeling, or the feeling enlarged to comprehend the mysteries of the dogma. This was the ground taken by the early reformers, the medi. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.