The Study of Theology

I Wish, in this paper, to say something about the spirit in which theology should be studied. I begin with a quotation for the length of which I must crave your indulgence :This then is a second and not the least pernicious peculiarity of Romanism. It professes to be a complete theology. It arranges, adjusts, explains, exhausts every part of the Divine Economy. It may be said to leave no region unexplored, no heights unattempted, rounding off its doctrines with a neatness and finish which is destructive of many of the most noble and most salutary exercises of mind in the individual Christian. That feeling of awe and piety which the mysteriousness of the Gospel should excite fades away under the fictitious illumination which is poured over the entire Dispensation. Criticism, we know, is commonly considered fatal to poetical fervour and imagination ; and in like manner this technical religion destroys the delicacy and reverence of the Christian mind. So little has actually been revealed to us in a systematic way, that the genuine science of the Gospel, carried to its fullest limits, has no tendency to foster a spirit of rationalism. But Rome would classify and number everything; she would settle every sort of question, as if determined to detect and compass by the reason what runs out into the next world or is lost in this .... It is sufficiently evident what an opening is given by a theology of so ambitious a character to pride and self-confidence. It has been said that knowledge is power; and at least it creates in us the imagination of possessing it. This is what makes scientific and physical researches so intoxicating; it is the feeling they inspire of perfect acquaintance with the constitution of nature

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