Yes, it is too plain; “Bibliolatry” and “Historical Religion,” in some shape,—­Vedas, Koran, or Bible,—­have been the world’s bane.  Had it not been for these, I suppose, we should everywhere have heard the invariable utterance of “spiritual religion” in the one dialect of the heart.

It is too certain that the world has found its spiritual “Babel”:  the one dialect of the heart is yet to be heard.

But I am not sure that the apologetic vein would not be wiser.  For what is this plea, but to acknowledge that man is so constituted that the boasted “religious sentiment,” the “spiritual faculty,”—­if it exist at all, and is any thing more than an ill-defined tendency, —­instead of being a glorious light which anticipates all external revelation, and renders it superfluous, is, in fact, about the feeblest in our nature; which everywhere and always is seduced and debauched by the most trumpery pretensions of the “historical” and “traditional”!  It is not so with people’s eyes; it is not so with people’s appetites; no parental influence or early instruction can make men think that green is blue, or stones and chalk good for food.  Yet this glorious faculty uniformly yields,—­goes into shivers in the encounter!  I, at least, will grant to Mr. Parker all he says of the pernicious and detestable character of the infinite variety of “false conceptions of God,” and to Mr. Newman all he says of the “degraded types” of religion; but then it was Man himself that framed all those “false conceptions,” and all those “degraded types.”  How came he thus universally to triumph over that divinely implanted faculty of spiritual discernment, which, if it exist, must be the most admirable feature of humanity; which these writers tell us anticipates all external truth, but which, it seems, greedily swallows all external error?  It almost universally submits to the most contemptible pretensions of a revelation, and acknowledges that it dares not to pronounce on that, even when false, of which, even when true, it is to be the sole source!  There never was an “historical” religion, however contemptible, that did not make its thousands of proselytes.  Man has been easily led to embrace the most absurd systems of mythology and superstition, and is willing even to go to death for them.

So far from venturing to set up the claims of the internal oracle in competition, man all but uniformly takes his religion from his fathers (no matter what), just as he takes his property; only the former, however worthless, he holds as infinitely the more precious.  Even when he surrenders it, he still surrenders it to some other “historical” religion:  it is to that he turns.  Such men as Mr. Newman and Mr. Parker—­though every one can see that their system too has been derived from without, that it is, in fact, nothing but a distorted Christianity—­may be numbered by units.  The vast bulk of mankind are unresisting victims of the “traditional” and “historical”; nay, rather eagerly