more than the faculties—­the laws of thought and feeling—­which, under conditions of development, actually give birth to thoughts and feelings.  These faculties and susceptibilities are, no doubt, congenital with the mind, —­or, rather, are the mind itself.  But its actually manifested phenomena wait the of the external; and they will be modified accordingly.  It is absolutely dependent on experience in this sense, that it is only as it is operated upon by the outward world that the dormant faculties, whatever they are, and whatever their nature, be they few or many,—­ intellectual, moral, or spiritual,—­are first awakened.  If a mind were created (it is, at least, a conceivable case) with all the avenues to the external world closed,—­in fact, we sometimes see approximations to such a condition in certain unhappy individuals,—­we do not doubt such a mind, by the present laws of the human constitution, could not possess any thoughts, feelings, emotions; in fact, could exhibit none of the phenomena, spiritual, intellectual, moral, or sensational, which diversify it.  In proportion as we see human beings approach this condition,—­in fact, we sometimes see them approach it very nearly,—­we see the “potentialities” of the soul (I do not like the word, but it expresses my meaning better than any other I know) held in abeyance, and such an imperfectly awakened man does not, in some cases, manifest the degree of sensibility or intelligence manifested in many animals.  If the seclusion from sense and experience be quite complete, the life of such a soul would be wrapped up in the germ, and possess no more consciousness than a vegetable.

It appears, then, that universally, however true it may be, and doubtless is, that the laws of thought and feeling enable us to derive from external influence what it alone would never give, yet that influences an indispensable condition, as we are at present constituted, of the development of any and of all our faculties.

As this seems the law of development universally, it is so of the spiritual and religious part of our nature as well as the rest; and in this very fact we have abundant scope for the possibility and utility of a revelation,—­if God be pleased to give one,—­even of elementary moral and spiritual truth; since, though conceding the perfect congruity between that truth and the structure of the soul, it is only as it is in some way actually presented to it from without, that it arrives at the conscious possession of it.  And what, after all, but such an external source of revelation is that Volume of Nature, which, operating in perfect analogy with the aforesaid conditions of the soul’s development, awakens, though imperfectly, the dormant elements of religious and spiritual life?  So far from its being true in any intelligible sense that an external revelation of moral and spiritual truth is impossible, it is absolutely necessary, in some form, as a condition of its evolution; so far from its being true that