ghtness and strength sufficient for his guidance and
support, is more hopelessly, deliberately, and diabolically wicked,
in thus everywhere and always substituting error for truth, and
superstition for religion,--in thus giving the historical and
traditional the uniform ascendency over the moral and
spiritual,--than even the most desperate Calvinist ever ventured
to represent him! Surely he is the most detestable beast that ever
crawled on the face of the earth, and, in a new and more portentous
sense, "loves darkness rather than light." The fact is, that--so
far from having even a suspicion that an external revelation is
useless or impossible--he, as already said, greedily seeks for it,
and devours it.

Nay, so far from its being authenticated by the history, or vouched
by the consciousness of the race, this very proposition--that man
stands in no need of an external revelation--first comes to him,
and rather late too, by an external revelation; even the revelation
of such writers as Mr. Parker and Mr. Newman. The last has been a
student of theology for twenty years, and has only just arrived at
this conviction, that he needed no light, inasmuch as he had plenty
of light "within." Brilliant, surely, it must have been! I can only
say for myself, that I do not, even with such aid, find myself in any
superfluous illumination, and would gladly accept, with Plato, some
divine communication, of which, heathen as he was, he acknowledged the
necessity.

The mode of accounting for man's universal aberrations, from the
tyranny of "Bibliolatry" and superstitious and pernicious "education,"
--seeing that it is a tyranny of man's own imposing,--is exactly
like that by which some theologians seek to elude the argument
of man's depravity; it is owing, they say, to the influence of
a universally depraved education! But whence that universally
depraved education they forget to tell us. Meantime, the inquirer
is apt to put that universal proclivity in the matter of education
to that very depravity for which it is to account.

Similarly, one is apt to infer, from man's tendency to deviate into
any path of religious superstition and folly, that the spiritual
lantern he carries within casts but a feeble light upon hit path.
This plea, therefore, is utterly worthless; for if it were true,
that the influence of tradition and historic association, when
once set up, could thus darken and debauch the natural faculty,
whose specific office