“There is no book in all the world,” says he, “which I love and esteem so much as the New Testament, with the devotional parts of the Old.  There is none which I know so intimately, the very words of which dwell close to me in my most sacred thoughts, none for which I so thank God, none on which my soul and heart have been to so great an extent moulded.  In my early boyhood, it was my private delight and daily companion; and to it I owe the best part of whatever wisdom there is in my manhood.” (Soul, pp. 241, 242.)

I only doubt whether even this testimony, strong as it is, fully represents the power which the Book has had in modifying his interior life, though he would now fain renounce its proper authority; whether it has not had more to do than he thinks in originating his conception of such “moral and spiritual” truth as he still recognizes.  Its very language comes so spontaneously to his lips, that his dialect of “spiritualism” is one continued plagiarism from David and Isaiah, Paul and Christ.  Nay, I may well be doubted whether the entire substance of his spiritual theory be any thing else than a distorted and mutilated Christianity.

Some of the previous observations apply to the possibility and utility of a divinely originated statement of “ethical truth”; nor will they be neutralized by an objection which Mr. Newman is fond of urging, —­namely, that a book cannot express (as it is freely acknowledged no book can) the limitations with which maxims of critical truth are to be received and applied; that all it can do is to give general principles, and leave them to be applied by the individual reason and conscience.  Such reasoning is refuted by fact.  The same thing precisely is done, and necessarily done, in every department in which men attempt to convey instruction in any particular art or method.  It is thus with the general principles of mechanics, of law, of medicine.  Yet men never entertain a notion that the collection and inculcation of such maxims are of no use, or of little, merely because they must be intelligently modified and not blindly applied in action.  If indeed there were any force in the objection, it would put an end to all instruction,—­that of Mr. Newman’s “spiritual faculty” amongst the rest, for that too can only prompt us by general impulses, and leaves us in the same ignorance and perplexity how far we are to obey them.  That is still to be otherwise determined.  The genuine result of such reasoning, if it were acted upon, would be that we need never, in any science or art whatever, trouble ourselves to enunciate any general principle or maxim, because perfectly useless!  Similarly, we need never inculcate on children the duty of obeying their honoring their superiors, of being frugal or diligent, humble or aspiring, the particular circumstances and limitations in which they are to be applied being indeterminate!  But is not the experience of every day and of all the world against it?  Is not the early and sedulous