all the various principles of our nature have wheedled the “spiritual faculty.”  Only listen to a brief specimen of the “by-path meadows” which entice the poor soul from the direct course of its development, and judge whether a communication from Heaven, if it were only to the extent of a sign-post by the way-side, might not be of use!  First comes “awe.”  “But even in this early stage,” says Mr. Newman, “numberless deviations take place, and mark especially the rudest Paganism.  We may embrace them under the general name of Fetichism, which here claims attention ......  But even in the midst of enlightened science, and highly literate ages, errors fundamentally identical with those of Fetichism may and do exist, and with the very same results.” (Soul, pp. 7, 10.) Then comes wonder:  “But of this likewise we find numerous degraded types in which the rising religion is marred ......  Of this we have eminent instances in the gods of Greece, and in the fairies of the German and Persian tribes ......  Under the same head will be included the grotesque devil-stories and other legends of the Middle Ages ......  Yet the dreadful alternative of gross superstition is this, that the graver view tends to cruel and horrible rites, while the fanciful and sportive sucks out the life-blood of devout feeling.” (Ibid. pp. 14-16.) Then comes the sense of beauty:  “This was strikingly illustrated in Greek sculpture.  A statue of exquisite beauty, representing some hero, or an Apollo, because of its beauty, seemed to the Greeks a fit object of worship ......  An opposite danger is often remarked to accompany the use of all the fine arts as handmaids to religion; namely, that the would-be worshipper is so absorbed in mere beauty as never to rise into devotion.” (Ibid. pp. 21, 23.) Then comes the sense of order; but, alas!  Atheism and Pantheism, and other “degrading types,” may be begotten of it!

As I look at men thus tumbling into error along this wretched causeway to heaven, I seem to be viewing Addison’s bridge of human life, with its broken arches, at each of which thousands are falling through.  This way to the “celestial city” ought to be called the “Northwest Passage”; it has one, and only one, trait of your Christian path:  “there will be few that find it.”

If, then, by the confession of these writers, the “false conceptions” and the “degraded types”—­the result of what are as truly “principles” of man’s nature as the supposed “spiritual faculty,” only that this last always has the worst in the conflict—­have universally, and for unknown ages, involved man in the darkest abysses of superstition, crime, and misery, surely external revelation is any thing but superfluous; and if impossible, so much the worse.