Now in both these two respects the acceptance of religious dogma is not essentially in contrast, but rather is parallel, with that of scientific principles. For religious truth is neither in its first acceptance a mere matter of blind submission to authority, nor is it stagnant and unprogressive after it is accepted. However different in other ways the leading truths of the Creed may be from scientific principles; in this respect at least they are not different,--that not one of them is ever brought for the acceptance of men without some really intelligent evidence and ground for acceptance. If any man is asked to accept them, without any intelligent ground for the acceptance, we may be bold perhaps to assert that it would be his duty to refuse. Of course, however, authority will itself be a large part of his intelligent ground; a larger part or a smaller according to circumstances. But then there is no proper antithesis between believing in deference to authority, and believing in deference to reason, unless it is understood that the authority believed in was accepted at first as authority _without reason_, or maintained in spite of the subsequent refusal of reason to give confirmatory witness to its assertions. Even in the cases in which there seems to be least use of reason, the case of a young child learning at his mother's knee, or of a man whose spirit has suffered and been broken, and who gives himself up at last to the mere guidance of a friend or a teacher, the authority, when accepted at all, is accepted on grounds essentially reasonable. The child's reasoning may differ in quality from the prodigal's; but the child trusts father or mother on grounds which are wholly, if unconsciously, a product of the strictest reason; and the prodigal has felt in his inmost soul alike the deadness of his own spiritual being, and the power and the beauty which are in the life of the teacher upon whom he throws himself. And this is not the only point; for the reasonable mind in one is not a thing different in nature from the reasonable mind in another, or from the eternal reason which is in God. The truths, therefore, which we are taught about God, and man, and Christ, about sin, and redemption from sin, and the heaven of holiness, and which seem to be accepted as a mere act of not unreasonable dutifulness, do reasonably withal commend themselves, in some shape or measure, even to the callow mind from its earliest immaturity. There is that in the very consciousness of child, or of criminal, with which they are in essential harmony. That in him with which they are in essential correspondence bears witness of them. Nor is anyone, in his acceptance of them, wholly insensible of this witness to their truth, which is, in fact, engraven upon his own conscious being.