For his “spiritual” illumination, it is easy to see Mr. Newman’s exclusive dependence on that Bible which he abjures as a special revelation.  If it has not been so to mankind, it has, at least, been so to Mr. Newman.  To it he perpetually runs for argument and illustration.  Among those who will accept his infidelity I apprehend there will be few who will not recoil from his representations of spiritual experience, so obviously nothing more than a disguised and mutilated Christianity.  They will say, that they do not wish the “new cloth sewed on to the old garment”; scarcely a soul amongst them will sympathize with his soul’s “sorrows,” or share his soul’s “aspirations”!

But, however these things may be, I now proceed to what I acknowledge is the most weighty topic of my argument; which is to prove that, if I acquiesce, on Mr. Newman’s grounds, in the rejection of the Bible as a special revelation of God, I am compelled on the very same principles to go a few steps further, and to express doubts of the absolutely divine original of the World, and the administration thereof, just as he does of the divine original of the Bible.  If I concede to Mr. Newman, however we may differ as to the moral and spiritual faculties of man, that these are yet the sole and ultimate court of appeal to us; that from our “intuitions” of right and wrong, of “moral and spiritual, truth,” be they more perfect according to him, or more rudimentary and imperfect according to me, we must form a judgment of the moral bearings of every presumed external revelation of God,—­I cannot do otherwise than reject much of the revelation of God in his presumed Works as unworthy of him, just as Mr. Newman does very much in his supposed Word as equally unworthy of him.  Mr. Newman says, “Only by discerning that God has Virtues, similar in kind to human Virtues, do we know of his truthfulness and his goodness......  The nature of the case implies, that the human mind is competent to sit in moral and spiritual judgment on a professed revelation, and to decide (if the case seem to require it) in the following tone:—­’This doctrine attributes to God that which we should all call harsh, cruel, or unjust in man:  it is therefore intrinsically inadmissible; for if God may be (what we should call) cruel, he may equally well be (what we should call) a liar; and, if so, of what use is his word to us?’” (Soul, p. 58) Similarly Mr. Newman continually affirms that God reveals himself, when he reveals himself at all, within, and not without; as he says in his “Phases,”—­“Of our moral and spiritual God we know nothing without,—­every thing within.  It is in the spirit that we meet him not in the communications of sense.” (p. 52.) If I acquiesce in this judgment, I must apply the reasoning of the above passage to the “external revelation” of God in his Works, as well as to that in his Word; and the above reasoning will be equally valid, merely substituting one word for the other.  We are to decide, if the case seem to require it, in the following tone:—­“These phenomena—­this conduct—­implies what we should call in man harsh, or cruel, or unjust; it is, therefore, intrinsically inadmissible as God’s work or God’s conduct.”