The missionary, no doubt, presents the church to their rational acceptance, and must, therefore, present to them the motives of credibility, or the facts which accredit her as divinely instituted and commissioned, and these motives, these facts, must be addressed to their understanding, and be such as their reason can pass upon and accept or reject. But the question is, Supposing reason has passed upon these facts or the motives, and found them sufficient to accredit the church, as a teacher come from God, and commissioned or authorized by him to teach his word, is not the acceptance of that word on her authority as the word of God a “rational acceptance,” and all the most rigid reason does or can demand? The lawyer says no; and because all authority is in the person, and resides nowhere _outside_ of him, and therefore it is necessary that reason should pass upon the contents of the word, that is, upon the doctrines and mysteries contained in the word the church professes to teach, which is impossible; for it requires the finite to pass upon the infinite and absolute, which exceeds its powers; therefore, faith is impossible. But this simply implies that no belief is admissible that is not science, and faith must be swallowed up in knowledge, and thus cease to be faith, before the human mind can rationally accept it. The trouble with the lawyer’s objection is that it assumes that faith is irrational, unless it is science or knowledge. His statement goes even farther than this. He not only denies that there can be any rational belief on extrinsic authority, but that there is or can be any such authority, or that any state, church, or _being_ has or can have any authority _outside_ of me, or not derived from me. This, as far as words go, asserts that God himself has no authority over me, and his word has no authority for my reason or will, not dependent on me. We do not believe he means this, for he is not divested of the reason common to all men. He means, we presume, simply that no state, no church, not even God himself, has any authority on which I can rationally believe anything which transcends the reach of my reason, or which is not intrinsically evident to my reason by its own light. 150 But what is evident to me by the light of my own reason, I know, and not simply believe. As belief is always on extrinsic authority simply accredited to reason, this goes so far as to deny that any belief is or can be rational, and that any authority or any amount of testimony is sufficient to warrant it, which, as we have seen, is much farther than the lawyer can go in the practice of his profession, or any man in the ordinary business of life.