the development and
improvement of the race must depend on an instrument by which an
inter-connection can be maintained between its parts; till then,
progress must not only be most precarious, but virtually impossible.
To the truth of this all history testifies. I say, then, not only
that, if God has given man a revelation at all, he has but acted
in analogy with that law by which he has made man so absolutely
dependent upon external culture, but that if he has given it in
the very shape of a book, he has acted also in strict analogy
with the very form in which he has imposed that law
on the world. He has simply made use of that instrument, which,
by the very constitution of our nature and of the world, he has
made absolutely essential to the progress and advancement of
humanity. May we not conclude from analogy, that if God has
indeed thus constituted the world, and if he busies himself at all
in the fortunes of miserable humanity, he has not disdained to take
part in its education, by condescendingly using that very instrument
which himself has made the condition of all human progress? I think,
even if you hesitate to admit that God has given us a "book-revelation,"
you must admit it would be at least in manifest coincidence with the
laws of human development and the "constitution and course of nature."

To conclude; I must say that Mr. Newman, in his account of the genesis
of religion, does himself in effect admit (as Harrington has remarked)
an "external revelation," though not in a book. For what else is that
apparatus of external influences by which the several preparatory or
auxiliary emotions are awakened, and the development of your "spiritual
faculty" effected?--contact with the outward world,--with visible and
material nature,--the instruction of the living voice! You acknowledge
all this without derogation, as you imagine, to the sublime and divine
functions of the indwelling "spiritual" power, why this rabid, this, I
might almost say, puerile (if I ought not rather to say fanatical),
hatred of the very notion of a "book-revelation"?

Let us confess that, if a revelation be possible at all, it cannot be
more worthy of God to give one even from "within" than in such a shape
as a "book"; since without a "BOOK" man remains an idolater, in spite of
his fine "spiritual faculties," and a barbarian, in spite of his
sublime intellect; in fact, not much better than the beasts, in spite
of all those noble capacities