t solution; and firmly believe with Pascal, that without it
moral and religious philosophy must toil over the problem of
humanity in vain.

If this be so, we have, of course, no difficulty in believing that
there may be, in spite of the existence of the religious faculty in
man, ample scope for an external revelation, to correct its aberrations
and remedy its maladies.

But you will say that this fact is not to be taken for granted. I admit
it; and therefore lay no further stress upon it. I go one step further;
and shall endeavor, at least, to prove, that, supposing man is just
as he was created, yet also supposing, what neither Mr. Parker nor
Mr. Newman will deny, (and if they did, the whole history of the world
would confute them,) that man's religious faculty is not uniform or
determinate in its action, but is dependent on external development
and culture for assuming the form it does, ample scope is still left
for an external revelation. I contend that the entire condition of this
susceptibility (as shown by experience) proves that, if in truth an
external revelation be impossible, it is not because it has superseded
the necessity for one; and that the declaration of the elder deists
and modern "spiritualists" on this in the face of what all history
proves man to be, is the most preposterous in the world.

Further; I contend that all the analogies from the fundamental laws
of the development of man's nature,--from a consideration of the
relations in which that nature stands to the external world,--from
the absolute dependence of the individual on external culture, and
that of the whole species on its historic development,--are all in
favor of the notion both of the possibility and utility of an external
revelation, and even in favor of that particular form of it which
Mr. Newman and you so contemptuously call a "book" revelation.

I. I argue from all the analogies of the fundamental laws of the
development of the human mind. Nor do I fear to apply the reasoning
even to the cases in which it has been so confidently asserted that
there can be no revelation, on the fallacious ground that a
revelation "of spiritual and moral truth" presupposes in man certain
principles to which it appeals. To possess certain faculties for the
appreciation of spiritual and moral truth is one thing; to acquire
the conscious possession of that truth is another; the former fact
would not make an external revelation superfluous, or an em