When we say that any principle or faculty is common to the whole species, do we not make the proof of this depend upon the uniformity of the phenomena which exhibit it?  When we say, for example, that hunger and thirst are universal appetites, is it not because we find them universal? or if we say that the senses of sight and hearing are characteristic of the race, do we not contend that these are so, because we find them uniform in such an immense variety of instances, that the exceptions are not worth reckoning?  If men sometimes saw black where others saw white, some objects rectilinear which others saw curved, objects small which others saw large,—­nay, the very same men at different times seeing the same objects differently colored, and of varying forms and attitudes, and every second man almost stone-blind into the bargain,—­I rather think that, instead of saying men were endowed with one and the same power of vision, we should say that our nature exhibited only an imperfect and rudimentary tendency towards so desirable a faculty; but that a clear, uniform, faculty of vision there certainly was not.  As I gaze upon the spectacle of the infinite diversities of religion, which variegate, but, alas! do not beautify the what is there to remind me of every uniformity of which I do see the indelible traces in every faculty really characteristic of our nature; as, for example, our senses and our appetites?  Powerfully does Hume urge this argument in his—­“Natural History of Religions.”  (Introduction)

I have my doubts—­admire the modesty of a sceptic—­whether the entire phenomena of religion do not favor the conclusion, that man, in this respect, only the traces of an imperfect, truncated creature; that, he is in the predicament of the half-created lion so graphically described by Milton:—­

“Now half appeared
The tawny lion, pawings to get free
His hinder parts”;

only, unfortunately, man’s “hinder parts”—­his lower nature—­have come up first, and appear, unhappily, prominent; while his nobler “moral and spiritual faculties” still seem stuck in the dust!

There is, indeed, another hypothesis, which squares, perhaps, equally well with the phenomena,—­I mean that of the Bible:—­that man is not in his original state; that the religions constitution of his nature, in some way or other, has received a shock.  But either this, or the supposition that man has been insufficiently equipped for the uniform elimination of religious truth, is, I think, alone in harmony with the facts; and to those facts, patent on the page of the whole world’s history, I appeal for proof that man has not on these highest subjects, the certitude of any internal revelation, marked by the remotest analogy to those other undoubted principles and faculties which exhibit themselves with undeniable uniformity.