—–­ * He cited the substance of these sentiments.  I have since referred to, and here quote, the ipsissima verba.  See “Letters,” &c., pp. 175, 212. —–­

Painful as were the “revelations” which ensued, I would not have missed them on any account.  “In vino veritas,” says the proverb which on this occasion lied most vilely; yet it was true in the only sense in which “veritas” is there used; for there was unbounded candor and frankness, under the inspiring hospitality of our host, aided by his skilful management of the conversation.  Nor was there, I am bound to say, much of coarse ribaldry, even from the free-spoken representative of the Tindals and Woolstons of other days.  But the varieties of judgment and opinion in that small company were almost numberless.  Fellowes, and two of the Rationalists, were firm believers in the theory of “insight”; that the human spirit derives, by immediate intuition from the “depths” of its consciousness, a “revelation of religious and spiritual truth.”  They differed, however, as to several articles; but especially as to the little point, whether the fact of man’s future existence was amongst the intimations of man’s religious nature; one contending that it was, another that it was not, and Fellowes, as usual, with several more of the company, declaring that their consciousness told them nothing about the matter either way.  But when some one further declared, amidst these very disputes, that this internal revelation was so clear and plain as not only to anticipate and supersede any “external” revelation, but to render it “impossible” to be given, our host suddenly broke out into a fit of laughter.  The disputants were silent, and every one looked to him for an explanation.  He seemed to feel that it was due, and, after apologizing for his rudeness, said, that, while some of them were asserting man’s clear internal revelation, he could not help thinking of the whimsical contrast presented by the diversified speculations and opinions of even this little party, and the infinitely more whimsical contrast presented by the gross delusions of polytheism and superstition, which in such endless variations of form and unchanging identity of folly had misled the nations of the earth for so many thousands of years:  “And just then,” said he, “it occurred to me what a curious commentary it would be on the asserted unity and sufficiency of ’internal revelation,’ if the ’Great Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations’ were followed up by a ’Great Exhibition of the Idolatry of all Nations’ under the same roof.  Thither night be brought specimens of the ingenious handicraft of men in the manufacture of deities; we might have the whole process, in all its varieties, complete; the raw material of a God in a block of stone or wood, and the most finished specimen in the shape of a Phidian Jupiter; the countless bits of trumpery which Fetichism has ever consecrated; the divine monsters of ancient Egypt, and the equally