sense, without some external aid,—­and the Bible may be at least as effectual,—­the religious faculty will not expand at all; and that, even where there are these indispensable external influences, the recognition of the truth is obscure or bright, as those influences vary in their degrees of appropriateness.  Where they are rude and imperfect, (as amongst barbarous nations) we have the spectacle of a soul which struggles towards the light, like a plant to which but small portion of the sun’s rays is admitted; it depends on the free admission of the light whether or not it shall arrive at its full development,—­its beauty, its fragrance, and its color.  The most that merely human culture can promise, even under the most favorable circumstances, (witness ancient Greece!) is that men, in some few favored instances, may possibly attain those truths which it may be admitted are congenital to the soul, and easily recognized when once propounded but which, in fact, few men, by nature’s sole teaching, ever do clearly attain.  It is infinitely important that the path, dimly explored by sages alone, should be thrown open to mankind.  Is it not even possible, then, that this task should be performed by a book like the Bible? and if such a book were given, would it not be, I once more ask, in analogy with the fundamental laws of the soul’s development,—­its uniform dependence on external influences for any result, and the variable nature of that result, as the influence itself is more or less appropriate?  To affirm that each man at once, by in internal illumination alone, attains a clear recognition of even elementary “moral and spiritual truth” is to ignore the laws according to which the soul’s activity is developed, and to contradict universal experience, which tells us that the great majority of mankind are but in partial possession of this “spiritual and moral truth,” and hold it for the most part in connection with the most prodigious and pernicious errors.

You will perceive that I have here chosen to argue the question of the possibility and utility of a “revelation” on your own grounds; but recollect what I have said, that, in fact, the principal reasons for a revelation would still remain in force, even if all you demand were conceded.  It is a point which I do not find that Mr. Newman’s dictum affects.

There may obviously be other facts and other truths as intimately connected with man’s destinies and happiness as the elementary truths of religious and moral science; facts and truths which may be necessary to give efficacy to mere elementary principles, and to supply motives to the performance of moral precepts.  And how ample in this respect are man’s necessities, and how large the field for a “divine revelation,” if we content ourselves with such a meagre theology as that of Mr. Parker and Mr. Newman, you see plainly enough in the questions asked by Harrington!  How many of Mr. Newman’s and Mr. Parker’s assumptions—­the moment they step beyond