in various forms, is sapping the religion of our people, and which, if not checked, will by and by give the Romish bishops a better title to be called bishops in partibus infidelium than has always been the case.  The attempt to make men believe too much naturally provokes them to believe too little; and such has been and will be the recoil from the movement towards Rome.  It is only one, however, of the causes of that widely diffused infidelity which is perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon of our day.  Other and more potent causes are to be sought in the philosophic tendencies of the age, and especially a sympathy, in very many minds, with the worst features of Continental speculation.  “Infidelity!” you will say.  “Do you mean such infidelity as that of Collins and Bolingbroke, Chubb and Tindal?” Why, we have plenty of those sorts too, and—­worse; but the most charming infidelity of the day, a bastard deism in fact, often assumes a different form,—­a form, you will be surprised to hear it, which embodies (as many say) the essence of genuine Christianity!  Yes; be it known to you, that when you have ceased to believe all that is specially characteristic of the New Testament,—­its history, its miracles, its peculiar doctrine—­you may still be a genuine Christian.  Christianity is sublimed into an exquisite thing called modern “spiritualism.”  The amount and quality of “faith” are, indeed, pleasingly diversified when come to examine individual professors thereof; but it always based upon the principle that man is a light to himself; that his oracle is within; so clear either to supersede the necessity—­some say even possibility—­of all external revelation in any sense of that term; or, when such revelation is in some sense allowed, to constitute man the absolute arbiter how much or how little of it is worthy to be received.

This theory we all perceive, of course, cannot fail to recommend itself by the well-known uniformity and distinctness of man’s religious notions and the reasonableness of his religious practices!  We all know there has never been any want of a revelation;—­of which have doubtless had full proof among the idolatrous barbarians you foolishly went to enlighten and reclaim.  I wish, however, you had known it fifteen years ago; I might have had my brother with me still.  It is a pity that this internal revelation—­the “absolute religion,” hidden, as Mr. Theodore Parker felicitously phrases it, in all religions of all ages and nations, so strikingly avouched by the entire history of world—­should render itself suspicions by little discrepancies in its own utterances among those who believe in it.  Yet so it is.  Compared with the rest of the world, few at the best can be got to believe in the sufficiency of the internal light and the superfluity all external revelation; and yet hardly two of the flock agree.  It is the rarest little oracle!  Apollo himself might envy its adroitness in the utterance ambiguities.  One man says that the doctrine of “future life”