Thomas Paine, who famously wrote Common Sense and The Rights of Man, also wrote The Age of Reason. It was in The Age of Reason that Thomas Paine sought to undermine historic Christianity in favor of Deism, or, as he saw it, “pure religion”. Calvinist Baptist pastor Andrew Fuller responded to Paine’s work. In this quote, Fuller says that philosophy (or reason) can only take one so far.
[I]t might be proved that every system of philosophy is little in comparison of Christianity. Philosophy may expand our ideas of creation; but it neither inspires love to the moral character of the Creator, nor well-grounded hope of eternal life. Philosophy, at most, can only place us at the top of Pisgah: there, like Moses, we must die; it gives us no possession of the good land. It is the province of Christianity to add, “All is yours!” When you have ascended to the height of human discovery, there are things, and things of infinite moment too, that are utterly beyond its reach. Revelation is the medium, and the only medium, by which, standing, as it were, “on nature’s Alps,” we discover things which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, and of which it never hath entered into the heart of man to conceive.
Andrew Fuller, The Gospel Its Own Witness; Or The Holy Nature and Divine Harmony of the Christian Religion Contrasted with the Immorality and Absurdity of Deism, 1799.
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