olves
the latent caloric, and makes it a powerful and active element.

I cannot help thinking that the great source of fallacy on this
subject arises from confounding the idea of certain characteristic
tendencies and potentialities of our nature with the supposition,--
contradicted by the whole religious history of man in all ages,--that
they must be everywhere efficaciously active, and spontaneously exhibit
a moral manifestation; than which there cannot, I conceive, be a
greater error.

I must entreat you to recollect Harrington's dilemma. Either the
supposed truths of your spiritual theory, or that of Mr. Newman or
Mr. Parker, are known to all mankind, or not; if they are, surely
their books, and every such book is the most important in the world;
if not, these authors did well to write, supposing them to have truth
on their side; but then that vindicates the possibility and utility
of a "book-revelation."

II. But I go a step further, and not only contend that, from the
very law of the soul's development, there is ample scope for a
revelation, even of elementary "moral and spiritual truth," but that
even if we supposed all men in actual possession of that truth, in
some shape or other, there would still be abundant scope for a
divinely constructed external instrument for giving it efficacy; and
that this, again, is in perfect analogy with the fundamental condition
of the soul's action. The principles of spiritual and religious life
are capable in an infinite variety of ways, of being modified,
intensified, vivified, by the external influences brought to bear
upon them from time to time. Not only must that external influence be
exerted for the first awakening of the soul, but it must be continued
all our life long, in order to maintain the principles thus elicited
in a state of activity. Sometimes they seem for a while to have
been half obliterated,--to fade away from the consciousness; they
are reillumined, made to blaze out again in brilliant light on the
"walls of the chambers of imagery," by some outward stimulus; by a
"word spoken in season"; by the recollection of some weighty apothegm
which embodies truth,--some ennobling image which illustrates it;
by the utterance of certain "charmed words," hallowed by association
as they fall on the external sense, or are recalled by memory. How
familiar to us all is this dependence on the external! How dull, how
sluggish, has often been the soul! A single word, the sig