The opponents of "faith by hearing" are accustomed to speak highly of the general sources of enlightenment the prospect of creation without us and the light of conscience within.
I. As regards the former its universality and perpetuity, as a disclosure of deity to mankind, are utterly contrasted with the Christian system. If God were to interfere at all, they maintain, it would be by some universal agency, simple, general, and obvious, as the laws of His visible creation. They smile at the notion of God's greatest exhibition of His will to man being acted upon the reduced theatre of a petty province and made dependent on the chances of human testimony. But what if we retort that those very laws of nature "on a great scale" have caused God to be forgotten? It is the permanence and uniformity of natural laws of creation that have beguiled men into speculative and still more into practical atheism; it is the very perfection of the laws which has hidden the legislator. Men ever cling to the nearest object: in the law they lose the lawgiver; or, what is more irrational, make a lawgiver of the law and deify the world.
II. The law of conscience. The gospel system overpasses every rival remedy, because it brings the affections to reinforce the conscience. Is this to debase the dignity of virtue? It is, as truly as when the virtuous father teaches his wayward child to love virtues by winning him to love his teacher. Is this to debase the majesty of the law to unveil the adorable benevolence of Him who is its living impersonation? Is it a weakness to keep the law through love of Him who gave the law? Proud and cruel mockery, which freezes to despair, on pretence of hardening to fortitude, which forbids the sick to be healed on any terms but those which the healthy alone could use, and rejects a remedy because it is remedial, which would delude us to starve in the midst of bounty, because forsooth it is unmanly to be dependent on food to perish of hunger rather than condescend to eat the Bread of Heaven!
W. Archer Butler, Sermons,1st series, p. 343.