which he knows to be very
deceivable organs, is to abandon his moral perceptions.

Nor is the case altered, if instead of Simon in person, a huge thing
called a Church is presented as a claimant of authority to Nathaniel.
Suppose him to be a poor Spaniard, surrounded by false miracles, false
erudition, and all the apparatus of reigning and unopposed Romanism.
He cannot cope with the priests in cleverness,--detect their
juggleries,--refute their historical falsehoods, disentangle their web
of sophistry: but if he is truehearted, he may say: "You bid me not
to keep faith with heretics: you defend murder, exile, imprisonment,
fines, on men who will not submit their consciences to your authority:
this I see to be wicked, though you ever so much pretend that God has
taught it you." So, also, if he be accosted by learned clergymen,
who undertake to prove that Jesus wrought stupendous miracles, or
by learned Moolahs who allege the same of Mohammed or of Menu, he is
quite unable to deal with them on the grounds of physiology, physics,
or history.--In short, nothing can be plainer, than that _the moral
and spiritual sense is the only religious faculty of the poor man_;
and that as Christianity in its origin was preached to the poor, so
it was to the inward senses that its first preachers appealed, as
the supreme arbiters in the whole religious question. Is it not then
absurd to say that in the act of conversion the convert is to trust
his moral perception, and is ever afterwards to distrust it?

An incident had some years before come to my knowledge, which now
seemed instructive. An educated, highly acute and thoughtful person,
of very mature age, had become a convert to the Irving miracles, from
an inability to distinguish them from those of the Pauline epistles;
or to discern anything of falsity which would justify his rejecting
them. But after several years he totally renounced them as a miserable
delusion, _because_ he found that a system of false doctrine was
growing up and was propped by them. Here was a clear case of a man
with all the advantages of modern education and science, who yet found
the direct judgment of a professed miracle, that was acted before his
senses, too arduous for him! He was led astray while he trusted his
power to judge of miracle: he was brought right by trusting to his
moral perceptions.

When we farther consider, that a knowledge of Natural Philosophy and
Physiology not only does not belong t