is undoubtedly a dictate of the “religious sentiment,”—­one of the few universal characteristics of all religion; another declares his “insight” tells him nothing of the matter; one affirms that the supposed chief “intuitions” of the “religious faculty”—­belief in the efficacy of prayer, the free will of man, and the immortality of the soul—­are at hopeless variance with intellect and logic; others exclaim, and surely not without reason, that this casts upon our faculties the opprobrium of irretrievable contradictions!  As for those “spiritualists”—­and they are, perhaps, at present the greater part—­who profess, in some sense, to pay homage to the New Testament, they are at infinite variance as to how much—­whether 7 1/2, 30, or 50 per cent of its records—­is to be received.  Very few get so far as the last.  One man is resolved to be a Christian,—­none more so,—­only he will reject all the peculiar doctrines and all the supernatural narratives of the New Testament; another declares that miracles are impossible and “incredible, per se”; a third thinks they are neither the one nor the other, though it is true that probably a comparatively small portion of those narrated in the “book” are established by such evidence as to be worthy of credit.  Pray use your pleasure in the selection; and the more freely, as a fourth is of opinion that, however true, they are really of little consequence.  While many extol in vague terms of admiration the deep “spiritual insight” of the founders of Christianity, they do not trouble themselves to explain how it is that this exquisite illumination left them to concoct that huge mass of legendary follies and mystical doctrines which constitute, according to the modern “spiritualism,” the bulk of the records of the New Testament, and by which its authors have managed to mislead the world; nor how we are to avoid regarding them either as superstitious and fanatical fools or artful and designing knaves, if nine tenths, or seven tenths, of what they record is all to be rejected; nor, if it be affirmed that they never did record it, but that somebody else has put these matters into their mouths, how we can be sure that any thing whatever of the small remainder ever came out of their mouths.  All this, ever, is of the less consequence, as these gentlemen descend to tell us how we are to separate the “spiritual” gold which faintly streaks the huge mass of impure ore of fable, legend, and mysticism.  Each man, it seems has his own particular spade and mattock in his “spiritual faculty”; so off with you to the diggings in these spiritual mines of Ophir.  You will say, Why not stay at home, and be content at once, with the advocates of the absolute sufficiency of the internal oracle, listen to its responses exclusively?  Ask these men—­for I am sure I do not know; I only know that the results are very different—­whether the possessor of “insight” listens to its own rare voice, or puts on spectacles and reads aloud from the New Testament.  Generally, as I