Similarly, one is apt to infer, from man’s tendency to deviate into any path of religious superstition and folly, that the spiritual lantern he carries within casts but a feeble light upon hit path.  This plea, therefore, is utterly worthless; for if it were true, that the influence of tradition and historic association, when once set up, could thus darken and debauch the natural faculty, whose specific office it was to convey, like the eye, specific intelligence, it would not account for the first tendencies of man to disown its authority in favor of an absurd and uniform submission to the usurpations of tradition and priestcraft.  The faculty is universally feeble against this influence; it staggers; whether from weakness or drunkenness little matters, except that the last is the viler infirmity of the two.  If we find a river turbid, it is of no consequence whether it was so as it issued from its fountain, or from pollutions which have been infused into its current lower down,—­it is a turbid river still.

On the whole, so far from admitting the principle of Mr. Newman, that a “book-revelation” of moral and spiritual truth is unnecessary, I should rather be disposed to infer the very contrary, from the uncertainty, vacillation, and feebleness of man’s spiritual nature.  I should be disposed to infer it, whether I look at the lessons which experience and history teach, or those taught by my own anxious and sincere scrutiny of my own consciousness.  If it be, on the other hand, as he says, “impossible,” mankind are in a very hopeless predicament, since it only proves that, the “spiritual insight” of man having unhappily failed the great majority of our race, it cannot be supplied by any external aid; that the malady, which is but too apparent, is also as apparently without a remedy.

For myself, I must say that I find myself hopelessly at issue with him in virtue of the above axiom, whether I receive or reject his theory of religious truth; for, if that axiom be true, I must reject his theory of religion,—­since it is nothing but a book-revelation to me,—­issued by Mr. Newman, instead of the Bible or the Koran.  On the other hand, if that theory be true, and I accept it, his maxim must be false, for the very same reason; since he himself will have given me a double book-revelation,—­a revelation at once of the theory and of the genesis of religion, both of which are in many respects absolute novelties to my consciousness.

But further; if we take the genesis of religion as described by either of these writers, and consider the infinite corruptions to which they both acknowledge a perverted, imperfect “development” of the “religious sentiment” and the “spiritual faculty” has led, one would imagine that an external communication from Heaven might be both very possible and very useful; useful, if only by cautioning men against those “false conceptions” which have so uniformly swamped the “idea,” and those “degraded types,” into which