Mr. Newman sometimes follows closely in Mr. Parker’s steps in the exercise of this bastard toleration, this spurious charity; though, in justice, I must say, he does not go his length.  Yet who can read without laughter that definition of idolatry, made apparently for the same preposterous purpose,—­to sanctify the hideous absurdities of the “religious sentiment,” and to save the credit of the “internal oracle”?  He says,—­“To worship as perfect and infinite one whom we know to be imperfect and finite, this is idolatry, and (in any bad sense) this alone ......  A man can but adore his own highest ideal; to forbid this is to forbid all religion to him.  If, therefore, idolatry is to mean any thing wrong and bad, the word must be reserved for the cases in which a man degrades his ideal by worshipping something that falls short of it.” (Soul, pp. 55, 56)

So that the most degraded idolater, if he but come up to his own ideal of the Divinity, is none at all, but a respectable worshipper!  It may be; but the idolater’s ideal of God is, generally, the reality of what others call the Devil!—­Only think of the divine ideal of a man who worships an image of his own making, with ten heads and twenty hands!  The definition reminds me of that passage in which Pascal’s Jesuit Father defines the moral sin of “idleness":—­“It is,” says he, “a grief that spiritual things should be spiritual, as if it should be regretted that the sacraments are the source of grace; and it is a mortal sin.”  “O Father!” said I, “I cannot imagine that any one can be idle in such a sense.”  “So Escobar says, ’I confess it is very seldom that any person fails into the sin of idleness.’  Now, surely, you must see the necessity of a good definition!”

No, no; few but Mr. Parker will affirm that the various religions which have overshadowed the world are essentially more one in virtue of the “absolute religion,” than they are different in virtue of their principles, tendencies, practices, and forms; while in none —­if we except Judaism and Christianity—­is there enough of the “absolute religion” to keep them sweet.

These apologies, odious as they are, are necessary if the credit of the “spiritual faculty” and the “absolute religion” is to be at all preserved.  But, unhappily, it is not a tone which can be consistently preserved.  Sometimes the religions of mankind are all tolerable enough, from the presence of the all-consecrating element; and sometimes, in spite of this great antiseptic, they are represented as the rotten, putrid things they are!  And then another answer, equally empty with the former, is hinted to save the credit of the darling oracle.  Its due influence has been perverted, its just expansion prevented, by the influence of national religions, by the intervention of the “historical” and “traditional,” by false and pernicious education;—­these things, it seems, have poisoned the waters of spiritual life in their source, else they had gushed out of the hidden fountains of the heart pure as crystal!