A Christian minister should beware of offering interpretations of Scripture which are repugnant to any clear discoveries of reason or dictates of conscience. This admonition is founded upon the very obvious principle, that a revelation of God must be adapted to the rational and moral nature which He has conferred on man; that God can never contradict in His Word what he has Himself written on the human heart, or teaches in His works and providence.

  All those interpretations of the Gospel which strike the mind at once as inconsistent with a righteous government of the universe, which require of man what is disproportioned to his nature, or which shock any clear conviction which our experience has furnished, cannot be viewed with too jealous an eye by him who, revering Christianity, desires to secure to it an intelligent belief.

  I answer too, that all sects of Christians agree, and are forced to agree, in frequently forsaking the literal sense on account of its incongruity with acknowledged truth. 

There is, in fact, no book in the world which requires us more frequently to restrain unlimited expressions, to qualify the letter by the spirit, and to seek the meaning in the state and customs of the writer and of his age, than the New Testament. No book is written in a more popular, figurative, and animated style -- the very style which requires the most constant exercise of judgment in the reader. 

The Scriptures are not a frigid digest of Christianity, as if this religion were a mere code of civil laws. They give us the Gospel warm from the hearts of its preachers. The language is not that of logicians, not the language of retired and inanimate speculation, but of affection, of zeal, of men who burned to convey deep and vivid impressions of truth. In understanding such writers, moral feeling is often a better guide than a servile adherence to the literal and most obvious meaning of every word and phrase. It may be said of the New as well as the Old Testament, that sometimes the letter killeth whilst the spirit gives life. 

Almost any system may be built on the New Testament by a commentator who, forgetting the general scope of Christianity and the lessons of nature and experience, shall impose on every passage the literal signification which is first offed to the mind. The Christian minister should avail himself, in his exposition of the Divine word, of the aids of learning and criticism, and also of he aids of reasons and conscience. Those interpretations of difficult passages which approve themselves to his clear and established conceptions of rectitude, and to his devout and benevolent affections, he should regard with a favorable eye; whilst those of an opposite character should be regarded with mistrust."