ask for it, and willingly submit to it.  What, then, can I infer, but either, 1st, that this vaunted internal faculty which supersedes all necessity of an external revelation is a delusion, and exists only as a vague and imperfect tendency; or, 2dly, that, as Christians say, it lies in ruins, and needs that external revelation, the possibility of which is denied; or, 3dly, that God has somehow made a great mistake in mingling the various elements of man’s composition, and miscalculating the overmastering power of the “historical” and “traditional “; or, 4thly, that man, having the original faculty still bright and strong, and that brightness and strength sufficient for his guidance and support, is more hopelessly, deliberately, and diabolically wicked, in thus everywhere and always substituting error for truth, and superstition for religion,—­in thus giving the historical and traditional the uniform ascendency over the moral and spiritual,—­than even the most desperate Calvinist ever ventured to represent him!  Surely he is the most detestable beast that ever crawled on the face of the earth, and, in a new and more portentous sense, “loves darkness rather than light.”  The fact is, that—­so far from having even a suspicion that an external revelation is useless or impossible—­he, as already said, greedily seeks for it, and devours it.

Nay, so far from its being authenticated by the history, or vouched by the consciousness of the race, this very proposition—­that man stands in no need of an external revelation—­first comes to him, and rather late too, by an external revelation; even the revelation of such writers as Mr. Parker and Mr. Newman.  The last has been a student of theology for twenty years, and has only just arrived at this conviction, that he needed no light, inasmuch as he had plenty of light “within.”  Brilliant, surely, it must have been!  I can only say for myself, that I do not, even with such aid, find myself in any superfluous illumination, and would gladly accept, with Plato, some divine communication, of which, heathen as he was, he acknowledged the necessity.

The mode of accounting for man’s universal aberrations, from the tyranny of “Bibliolatry” and superstitious and pernicious “education,” —­seeing that it is a tyranny of man’s own imposing,—­is exactly like that by which some theologians seek to elude the argument of man’s depravity; it is owing, they say, to the influence of a universally depraved education!  But whence that universally depraved education they forget to tell us.  Meantime, the inquirer is apt to put that universal proclivity in the matter of education to that very depravity for which it is to account.