140.
As to systems of religion alien from Christianity, if any of them have taught the doctrine of eternal life, the reward of obedience, as a dogma of belief, that doctrine is not their boast, but their burden and difficulty; inasmuch as they could never defend it.

They could never justify it on independent grounds of deduction, nor produce their warrant and authority to teach it.

In such precarious and unauthenticated principles it may pass for a conjecture, or pious fraud, or a splendid phantom: it cannot wear the dignity of truth.
Ah, why did not Mr.Davison adhere to the manly, the glorious, strain of thinking from p.

134 ('Since Prophecy', &c.) to p.139.

('that mercy') of this discourse?
A fact is no subject of scientific demonstration speculatively: we can only bring analogies, and these Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, and others did bring; but their main argument remains to this day the main argument--namely, that none but a wicked man dares doubt it.