a little ineffectual flutter by the aid of tradition, sink into barbarism again.  Till this cardinal want is supplied, all considerable “progress” is impossible.  It may look odd to say that the whole world is dependent on any thing so purely artificial; but, in point of fact, it is only another way of stating the truth that God has constituted the race a series of mutually dependent beings; and as each term of this series is perishable and evanescent, the development and improvement of the race must depend on an instrument by which an inter-connection can be maintained between its parts; till then, progress must not only be most precarious, but virtually impossible.  To the truth of this all history testifies.  I say, then, not only that, if God has given man a revelation at all, he has but acted in analogy with that law by which he has made man so absolutely dependent upon external culture, but that if he has given it in the very shape of a book, he has acted also in strict analogy with the very form in which he has imposed that law on the world.  He has simply made use of that instrument, which, by the very constitution of our nature and of the world, he has made absolutely essential to the progress and advancement of humanity.  May we not conclude from analogy, that if God has indeed thus constituted the world, and if he busies himself at all in the fortunes of miserable humanity, he has not disdained to take part in its education, by condescendingly using that very instrument which himself has made the condition of all human progress?  I think, even if you hesitate to admit that God has given us a “book-revelation,” you must admit it would be at least in manifest coincidence with the laws of human development and the “constitution and course of nature.”

To conclude; I must say that Mr. Newman, in his account of the genesis of religion, does himself in effect admit (as Harrington has remarked) an “external revelation,” though not in a book.  For what else is that apparatus of external influences by which the several preparatory or auxiliary emotions are awakened, and the development of your “spiritual faculty” effected?—­contact with the outward world,—­with visible and material nature,—­the instruction of the living voice!  You acknowledge all this without derogation, as you imagine, to the sublime and divine functions of the indwelling “spiritual” power, why this rabid, this, I might almost say, puerile (if I ought not rather to say fanatical), hatred of the very notion of a “book-revelation”?

Let us confess that, if a revelation be possible at all, it cannot be more worthy of God to give one even from “within” than in such a shape as a “book”; since without a “Book” man remains an idolater, in spite of his fine “spiritual faculties,” and a barbarian, in spite of his sublime intellect; in fact, not much better than the beasts, in spite of all those noble capacities which, although they are in him, are as it were hopelessly locked up till he has obtained this key to their treasures.