Every one,
even a child, has an impression about new faces; few persons have any
real view about new propositions. There is something in the sight of
persons or of bodies of men, which speaks to us for approval or
disapprobation with a distinctness to which pen and ink are unequal.
This is just the kind of evidence which is needed for use, in cases in
which private judgment is divinely intended to be the means of our
conversion. The multitude have neither the time, the patience, nor the
clearness and exactness of thought, for processes of investigation and
deduction. Reason is slow and abstract, cold and speculative; but man is
a being of feeling and action; he is not resolvable into a _dictum de
omni et nullo_, or a series of hypotheticals, or a critical diatribe, or
an algebraical equation. And this obvious fact does, as far as it goes,
make it probable that, if we are providentially obliged to exercise our
private judgment, the point toward which we have to direct it, is the
teacher rather than the doctrine.
In corroboration, it may be observed, that Scripture seems always to
imply the presence of teachers as the appointed ordinance by which men
learn the truth; and is principally engaged in giving cautions against
false teachers, and tests for ascertaining the true.
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