To this I answer, that the general tendency of philosophy is favourable to religion.  Its natural tendency is to give the mind grand and sublime ideas, and to produce in it a belief of the existence of one great cause, which is not visible among men.  Thus, for example, I find that the planets perform a certain round!  They perform it with a certain velocity.  They do not wander at random, but they are kept to their orbits.  I find the forces which act upon them for this purpose.  I find, in short, that they are subject to certain laws.  Now, if the planets were living agents, they might have prescribed these laws to themselves.  But I know that this, when I believe them to consist of material substances, is impossible.  If then, as material substances, they are subject to laws, such laws must have been given them.  There must have been some lawgiver.  In this manner then I am led to some other great, and powerful, and invisible Agent or Cause.  And here it may be observed, that if philosophers were ever baffled in their attempts at discovery, or in their attempts after knowledge, as they frequently are, they would not, on this account, have any doubt with respect to the being of a God.  If they had found, after repeated discoveries, that the ideas acquired from thence were repeatedly or progressively sublime, and that they led repeatedly or progressively to a belief of the existence of a superior Power, is it likely that they would all at once discard this belief, because there researches were unsuccessful?  If they were to do this, they would do it against all the rules of philosophizing, and against the force of their own habits.  I say, that analogical is a part of philosophical reasoning, and that they would rather argue, that, as such effects had been uniformly produced, so they would probably still be produced, if their researches were crowned with success.  The tendency then of philosophical knowledge is far otherwise than has been supposed.  And it makes highly in favour of the study of these sciences, that those who have cultivated them the most, such as Newton, and Boyle, and others, have been found among the ablest advocates for religion.[55]

[Footnote 55:  I by no means intend to say, that philosophy leads to the religion called Christianity, but that it does to Theism, which is the foundation of it.]

I come now, to the general arguments used by the Quakers against human learning, the first of which is, that they who possess it are too apt to reduce religion to reason, and to strip it of the influence of the Spirit.  But this is contrary, as a general position, to all fact.  We find no mention of this in history.  The fathers of the church were the most eminent for learning in their own days, and these insisted upon the Influence of the Spirit in spiritual concerns, as one of the first articles of their faith.  The reformers, who succeeded these, were men of extensive erudition also, and acknowledged the same great principle.  And nine-tenths, I believe, of the Christians of the present, day, among whom we ought to reckon nine-tenths of the men of learning also, adopt a similar creed.