CHAPTER VII.
THEORY OF RELIGIOUS LIBERALISM.
The Eclectic method of Philosophy, which was first exemplified in the celebrated School of Alexandria, and which has been recently revived under the auspices of M.Cousin in the Schools of Paris, may be regarded, in one of its aspects, as the most legitimate, and, indeed, as the only practicable course of successful intellectual research.

If by "eclecticism" we were to understand the habit of culling from every system that portion or fragment of truth which may be contained in it, and of rejecting the error with which it may have been associated or alloyed,--in other words, the art of "sifting the wheat from the chaff," so as to preserve the former, while the latter is dissipated and dispersed,--there could be no valid objection to it which would not equally apply to every method of Inductive Inquiry.

But this is not the sense in which "eclecticism" has been adopted and eulogized by the Parisian School.

For, not content with affirming that the same system may contain both truth and error, and that it is our duty to separate the one from the other,--which is the only rational "eclecticism,"-- M.
Cousin maintains that _error itself is only a partial or incomplete truth_; that if it be an evil, it is a necessary evil, and an eventual good, since it is a means, according to a fundamental law of human development, of evolving truth and advancing philosophy; and that thus the grossest errors may exert a salutary influence, insomuch that _Atheism itself may be regarded as providential_.[224] In this form, Eclecticism becomes a huge and heterogeneous system of SYNCRETISM, including all varieties of opinion, whether true or false; and it has a natural and inevitable tendency to issue in a spirit of INDIFFERENCE to the claims of truth, which may assume the form either of Philosophical Skepticism or of Religious Liberalism, according to the taste and temperament of the individual who embraces it.
In the form of Religious Liberalism, it has often been exemplified in our own country by those who, averse from definite articles of faith, and prone to latitudinarian license, have studiously set themselves to disparage the importance of the peculiar doctrines of Christianity, and even to obliterate the distinction between the various forms of Religion, natural and revealed, by representing them all as so many varieties of the same religious sentiment, so many diverse, but not antagonistic, embodiments of the same radical principle.

In the writings of Pope, several expressions occur which are easily susceptible of this construction, and which have often been quoted and applied in defence of Religious Liberalism, notwithstanding his explicit disavowal of it in his letter to the younger Racine, prefixed to the collected edition of his works.