of the problem?

With this "religious" theory admirably coincides the hypothesis of
man's having been originally created a savage, from which he was
gradually exalted to the lowest stages of civilization,--a theory
which I thought had (in mere shame) been abandoned to some few Deists
of the last century, or the commencement of this. It is true that these
writers do not expressly indorse it; but it is easy to see that they
favor it; and it is most certain that it alone is consistent with their
parallel theory of man's "religious development" from the vilest
Fetichism to (shall we say?) a mythical Christianity; though even
to that very few have yet arrived. According to this theory, the
Great Father--supposed a being of infinite power, wisdom, and
Goodness--threw his miserable offering on the face of the earth,
with an admirable "absolute religion," no doubt, and an "admirable
spiritual faculty," but the "idea" so inevitably subject to
thwarting "conceptions," and the "spiritual faculty" so perpetually
debauched by "awe and reverence," and the whole rabble of emotions
and affections with which it was to keep company,--in fact, with
the elements of his nature originally so ill poised and compounded,
--that everywhere and for unnumbered ages man has been doomed and
necessitated, and for unnumbered ages will be doomed and necessitated,
to wallow in the most hideous, degrading, cruel forms of superstition,
--inflicting and suffering reciprocally all the dreadful evils and
wrongs which are entailed by them. For this man was created; such a
thing he was,--through this "ordeal" he passes,--by original
destination. If this be the picture of the Father of All, he is less
kind to his off-spring than the most intimate "intuitions" teach
them to be to theirs. The voice of nature teaches them not to expose
their children; the Universal Father, according to this theory,
remorselessly exposed his! Such a God, projected by the "spiritual
faculties" of Mr. Newman and Mr. Parker, may be imagined to be a more
worthy object of worship than the "God of the Bible": he shall never
receive mine. If I am to abjure the Bible because it gives me
unworthy conceptions of the Deity, I must, with more reason, abjure,
on similar grounds, such a detestable theory of man's creation,
destination, and history.

As to that "progress" which is promised for the future, it is like
the necessity for the past, purely an invention of Mr. Parker; if I
receive it