hich gives birth to revealed: and even if this difficulty
should be surmounted, the disinclination to the supernatural would
nevertheless have a tendency to obliterate mystery by empirical
rationalism, and to reduce piety to morality, morality to expedience,(101)
the church to a political institution, religion to a ritual system, and
its evidence to external historic testimony.

The rival system of proof founded in intuitive consciousness is however
not free from danger. A difference occurs, according as this endowment is
regarded as merely revealing the facts of our own inner experience, or on
the other hand as possessing a power to apprehend God positively, and
spirit to spirit.(102) The result of the former belief would be indeed an
ethical religion, compared with the political one just described. If it
did not rise from the law to the law-giver, it would at least present
morality as a law obligatory on man by his mental structure, independently
of the consideration of reward and punishment. The ideas of God, duty,
immortality, would be established as a necessity of thought, if not as
matters of objective fact. Yet religion would be rather rational than
supernatural; obedience to duty instead of communion with Deity; and
unless the mind can find ground for a belief in God and the divine
attributes through some other faculty, the idealism must destroy the
evidence of revealed religion. Or at least, if the mind admit its truth,
it must renounce the right to criticise the material of that which it
confesses to be beyond the limits of its own consciousness; and thus, by
abdicating its natural powers, blindly submit to external authority, and
accept belief as the refuge from its own Pyrrhonism.

If, on the other hand, instead of regarding all attempts to pass beyond
logical forms of thought to be mental impotence, the mind follows its own
instincts, and, relying upon the same natural realism which justifies its
belief in the immediate character of its sensitive perceptions, ventures
to depend with equal firmness on the reality of its intuitional
consciousness, religion, natural or revealed, wears another aspect; and
both the advantages and the dangers of such a view are widely
different.(103) The soul no longer regards the landscape to be a scene
painted on the windows of its prison-house, a subjective limit to its
perceptions, but not speculatively true; but it wanders forth from its
cell unfettered into the universe aro