“Why, no man doubts his own consciousness,” said Harrington, laughing.  “The question is, What is its value?  What is the criterion of universal ‘spiritual truth,’ if there be any?  Those words in Paul’s mouth were well, and had a meaning.  In yours, I suspect they would have none, or a very different one.  He dreamt that he was giving to mankind (vainly, as seems) a system of doctrines and truths which were, many of them, transcendental to the human intellect and conscience, and which when revealed were very distasteful (and not least to you); but the assertion of a spiritual monopoly would assuredly sound rather odd in one who professes, if I understand you, that has given to man (for it is no discovery of any individual) an internal and universal revelation!  But of your possible limitations of your universal spiritual revelation,—­which all men ‘naturally’ possess, but which the ‘natural man’ receiveth not,—­we will talk after.  Sceptic as I am, I am not a sceptic who is reconciled to scepticism.  Meantime, you reject the Bible in toto, as an external revelation of God, if I understand you.”

“In toto; and I believe that it has received in this age its death-blow.”

“Ay, that is what the infidel has been always promising us; meantime, they somehow perish, and it laughs at them.  You remember, perhaps, the words of old Woolston, so many fragments of whose criticism, as those of many others, have been incorporated by Strauss.  He had, as he elegantly expresses it, ’cut out such a piece of work for the Boylean lectures as should hold them tug as long as the ministry of the letter should last’; for he too, you see, masked his infidelity by a distinction between the ‘letter’ and the ‘spirit,’ though he applied the convenient terms in a totally different sense.  Poor soul!  The fundamental principles of his infidelity are surrendered by Strauss himself.  Similarly, a score of assailants of the Bible have appeared and vanished since his day; each proclaiming, just as he himself went to the bottom, that he had given the Bible its death-blow!  Somehow, however, that singular book continues to flourish, to Propagate itself, to speak all languages, to intermingle more and more with the literature of all civilized nations; while mankind will not accept, slaves as they are, the intellectual freedom you offer them.  It is really very provoking; of what use is it to destroy the Bible so often, when it lives the next minute?  I have little doubt your new attempts will end just like the labors of the Rationalists of the Paulus school, so graphically described by the German writer whom I have already referred to.  ‘It is sad, no doubt,’ says he, or something to the same effect, ‘that, after fifty years’ exegetical grubbing, weeding, and pruning at ’the mighty primitive forest of the Bible, the next generation should persist in saying that the Rationalist had destroyed the forest only in his own addled imagination, and that it is just as it was.’”