I infer from this,—­that they have, for the most part, arrived at diametrically opposite conclusions from those of these interpreters of the spiritual revelation.  As to the articles, indeed; of man’s immortality and a future state, it would be truly difficult for my “spiritual insight” to verify theirs; for, according to Mr. Parker, his “insight” affirms that man is immortal, and Mr. Newman’s “insight” declares nothing about the matter!

Nor is my consciousness, so far as I can trace it, mine only.  This painful uncertainty has been the confession of multitudes of far greater minds; they have been so far from contending that we have naturally a clear utterance on these great questions, that they have acknowledged the necessity of an external revelation; and mankind in general, so far from thinking or feeling such light superfluous, have been constantly gasping after it, and adopted almost any thing that but bore the name.

What, then, am I to think of this all-sufficient revelation from within?

There is, indeed, an amusing answer of Mr. Newman’s to the difficulty:  but then it formally surrenders the whole argument.  He says to those who say they are unconscious of those facts of spiritual pathology which he describes in his work on the “Soul,” that the consciousness of the spiritual man is not the less true, that the unspiritual man is not privy to it; and this most devout gentleman somewhere quotes, with much unction, the words, “For the spiritual man judgeth all things, but himself is judged of no man.”

“I shall be curious to know,” said I, interrupting him, “what you will reply to that argument?”

Reply to it, said he, eagerly; does it require any reply?—­However, I will read what I have written.  Is it not plain, that while Mr. Newman is professedly anatomizing the spiritual nature of man, as man,—­the functions and revelations of that inward oracle which supersedes and anticipates all external revelations—­he is, in fact, anatomizing his own?  What title has he, when avowedly explaining the phenomena of the religious faculty which he asserts to be inherent in humanity,—­though how they should need explaining, if his theory be true, I know not,—­what title has he, when men deny that they are conscious of the facts he describes, to raise refuge in his own private revelations, and that of the few whose privilege it is to be “born again” by a mysterious law which he says it is impossible for us to investigate?  “We cannot pretend,” he says, “to sound the mystery whence comes the new birth, in certain souls.  To reply, ‘The Spirit bloweth where He listeth,’ confesses the mystery, and declines to explain it.  But it is evident that individuals in Greece, in the third century before the Christian era, were already moving towards an intelligent heart-worship or had even begun to practise it!” (Soul, p.64) High time, I think, that after some thousands of years some few individuals should begin to manifest the phenomena of the universal revelation from within, if such a thing be!