and manuals, verily of flaming heat, for they mingle the yearnings of a constrained celibacy with the fervencies of worship and the cravings after God.  Yes, there is meat here for every human mouth; only that, alas for men! the meat is that which perisheth, and not endureth unto everlasting life.  Rome, thou wert sagely schemed; and if Lucifer devised thee not for the various appetencies of poor, deceivable, Catholic Man, verily it were pity, for thou art worthy of his handiwork.  All things to all men, in any sense but the right, signifies nothing to anybody:  in the sense of falsehoods, take the former for thy motto; in that of single truth, in its intensity, the latter.

Let not then the accident—­the probable accident—­of the Italian superstition place any hindrance in the way of one whose mind is all at sea because of its existence.  What, O man with a soul, is all the world else to thee?  Christianity, whatever be its broad way of pretences, is but in reality a narrow path:  be satisfied with the day of small things, stagger not at the inconsistencies, conflicting words, and hateful strifes of those who say they are Christians, but “are not, but are of the synagogue of Satan.”  Judge truth, neither by her foes nor by her friends but by herself.  There was one who said (and I never heard that any writer, from Julian to Hobbes, ever disputed his human truth or wisdom) “Needs must that offences come; but wo be to that man by whom the offence cometh.  If they come, be not shaken in faith:  lo, I have told you before.  And if others fall away, or do ought else than my bidding, what is that to thee? follow thou ME.”

THE BIBLE.

Whilst I attempt to show, as now I desire to do, that the Bible should be just the book it is, from considerations of anterior probability, I must expand the subject a little; dividing it, first, into the likelihood of a revelation at all; and secondly, into that of its expectable form and character.

The first likelihood has its birth in the just Benevolence of our heavenly Father, who without dispute never leaves his rational creatures unaided by some sort of guiding light, some manifestation of himself so needful to their happiness, some sure word of consolation in sorrow, or of brighter hope in persecution.  That it must have been thus an a priori probability, has been all along proved by the innumerable pretences of the kind so constant up and down the world:  no nation ever existed in any age or country, whose seers and wise men of whatever name have not been believed to hold commerce with the Godhead.  We may judge from this, how probable it must ever have been held.  The Sages of old Greece were sure of it from reason:  and not less sure from accepted superstition those who reverenced the Brahmin, or the priest of Heliopolis, or the medicine-man among the Rocky Mountains, or the Llama of old Mexico.  I know that our ignorance of some among the most brutalized