Ver. 23. _"Shut up unto the faith." The Reasonableness of Faith._--The mode of conception is military. The law is made to act the part of a sentry, guarding every avenue but one, and that one leads those, who are compelled to take it, to the faith of the Gospel. Out of the leading varieties of taste and sentiment which obtain in the present age we may collect something which may be turned into an instrument of conviction for reclaiming men from their delusions and shutting them up to the faith. +I. There is the school of natural religion.+--It is founded on the competency of the human mind to know God by the exercise of its own faculties, to clothe Him in the attributes of its own demonstration, to serve Him by a worship and a law of its own discovery, and to assign to Him a mode of procedure in the administration of this vast universe upon the strength and plausibility of its own theories. They recognise the judicial government of God over moral and accountable creatures. They hold there is a law. One step more, and they are fairly shut up to the faith. That law has been violated. +II. There is the school of classical morality.+--It differs from the former school in one leading particular. It does not carry in its speculations so distinct and positive a reference to the Supreme Being. Our duties to God are viewed as a species of moral accomplishment, the effect of which is to exalt and embellish the individual. We ask them to look at man as he is and compare him with man as they would have him to be. If they find that he falls miserably short of their ideal standard of excellence, what is this but making a principle of their own the instrument of shutting them up unto the faith of the Gospel, or at least shutting them up into one of the most peculiar of its doctrines, the depravity of our nature, or the dismal ravage which the power of sin has made upon the moral constitution of the species? This depravity the Gospel proposes to do away. +III. There is the school of fine feeling and poetical sentiment.+--It differs from the school of morality in this--the one makes virtue its idol because of its rectitude, the other makes virtue its idol because of its beauty, and the process of reasoning by which they are shut up unto the faith is the same in both. However much we may love perfection and aspire after it, yet there is some want, some disease, in the constitution of man which prevents his attainment of it, that there is a feebleness of principle about him, that the energy of his practice does not correspond to the fair promises of his fancy, and however much he may delight in an ideal scene of virtue and moral excellence, there is some lurking malignity in his constitution which, without the operation of that mighty power revealed to us in the Gospel, makes it vain to wish and hopeless to aspire after it.--_Dr. Thomas Chalmers._