, 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" is undoubtedly a
dictate of the "religious sentiment,"--one of the few universal
characteristics of all religion; another declares his "insight"
tells him nothing of the matter; one affirms that the supposed
chief "intuitions" of the "religious faculty"--belief in the
efficacy of prayer, the free will of man, and the immortality of
the soul--are at hopeless variance with intellect and logic; others
exclaim, and surely not without reason, that this casts upon our
faculties the opprobrium of irretrievable contradictions! As for those
"spiritualists"--and they are, perhaps, at present the greater
part--who profess, in some sense, to pay homage to the New Testament,
they are at infinite variance as to how much--whether 7 1/2, 30, or
50 per cent of its records--is to be received. Very few get so far
as the last. One man is resolved to be