definition!"

No, no; few but Mr. Parker will affirm that the various religions
which have overshadowed the world are essentially more one in virtue
of the "absolute religion," than they are different in virtue of
their principles, tendencies, practices, and forms; while in none
--if we except Judaism and Christianity--is there enough of the
"absolute religion" to keep them sweet.

These apologies, odious as they are, are necessary if the credit of
the "spiritual faculty" and the "absolute religion" is to be at
all preserved. But, unhappily, it is not a tone which can be
consistently preserved. Sometimes the religions of mankind are all
tolerable enough, from the presence of the all-consecrating element;
and sometimes, in spite of this great antiseptic, they are represented
as the rotten, putrid things they are! And then another answer, equally
empty with the former, is hinted to save the credit of the darling
oracle. Its due influence has been perverted, its just expansion
prevented, by the influence of national religions, by the
intervention of the "historical" and "traditional," by false and
pernicious education;--these things, it seems, have poisoned the
waters of spiritual life in their source, else they had gushed out
of the hidden fountains of the heart pure as crystal!

Yes, it is too plain; "Bibliolatry" and "Historical Religion," in
some shape,--Vedas, Koran, or Bible,--have been the world's bane.
Had it not been for these, I suppose, we should everywhere have
heard the invariable utterance of "spiritual religion" in the one
dialect of the heart.

It is too certain that the world has found its spiritual "Babel":
the one dialect of the heart is yet to be heard.

But I am not sure that the apologetic vein would not be wiser. For
what is this plea, but to acknowledge that man is so constituted
that the boasted "religious sentiment," the "spiritual faculty,"--if
it exist at all, and is any thing more than an ill-defined tendency,
--instead of being a glorious light which anticipates all external
revelation, and renders it superfluous, is, in fact, about the feeblest
in our nature; which everywhere and always is seduced and debauched
by the most trumpery pretensions of the "historical" and
"traditional"! It is not so with people's eyes; it is not so with
people's appetites; no parental influence or early instruction can
make men think that green is blue, or stones and chalk good for food.
Yet this glorious