from time to time.  Not only must that external influence be exerted for the first awakening of the soul, but it must be continued all our life long, in order to maintain the principles thus elicited in a state of activity.  Sometimes they seem for a while to have been half obliterated,—­to fade away from the consciousness; they are reillumined, made to blaze out again in brilliant light on the “walls of the chambers of imagery,” by some outward stimulus; by a “word spoken in season”; by the recollection of some weighty apothegm which embodies truth,—­some ennobling image which illustrates it; by the utterance of certain “charmed words,” hallowed by association as they fall on the external sense, or are recalled by memory.  How familiar to us all is this dependence on the external!  How dull, how sluggish, has often been the soul!  A single word, the sight of an object surrounded with vivid associations, the sudden suggestion of a half-forgotten strain of poetry or song,—­what power have these to stir its stagnant depths, and awaken “spiritual” and every other species of emotion, as well as intellectual activity!  The lightning does not more suddenly cleave the cloud in which it slumbered, the sleeping ocean is not more suddenly ruffled by the descending tempest, than the soul of man is thus capable of being vivified and animated by the presentation of appropriate objects,—­nay, often by even the most casual external impulse.  If this be so, is it not possible that an external instrument for thus stimulating and vivifying spiritual life might be given us by God; which, if not, in literal strictness, a “revelation,” would virtually have all the effect of one, as rekindling the dying light, reillumining the fading characters, of spiritual truth?

Nor, surely, is there much presumption in supposing that the appropriate influences of such an instrumentality may be brought to bear upon us with infinite advantage by Him who alone possesses perfect access to all the avenues of our spirits; a perfect mastery of our whole nature; of intellect, imagination, and conscience of those laws of association and emotion which He himself has framed.  If Shakspeare and Milton can daily exercise over myriads of minds an ascendency which makes their admirers speak of them almost with the “Bibliolatry” with which Mr. Newman makes Christian speak of the Bible, I apprehend God could construct a “book,” even though it told man nothing which was strictly a revelation, which might be of infinite value to him; simply from the fact that the modes in which truths operate upon us, and by which our faculties are educated to their perfection, are scarcely less important than either the truths or the faculties themselves.

But I need say the less upon this point, inasmuch as Mr. Newman has spoken of the New Testament, and its influence over his mental history, in terms which conclusively show that, if it be not a “revelation,” ample space is left for such a divinely constructed book, if God were pleased to give one.