to allow my three propositions, and as you make no attempt to do away my reasoning, especially on my last, I think I should not understand you according to your own proposal in any other way. The methaphor which you use to help you away from my argument respecting the _importance_ of a revelation from God, does not appear fully adequate to the purpose for which you use it. It might not be a reasonable, a necessary disposition of property for the proposed benefactor, to give you a large estate; it might be, in the eye of reason a very improper donation, and one which would deprive legitimate heirs of what they had a right to expect from a father towards whom they had always acted with filial obedience.--But if you will make the case a parallel, and suppose you are an heir, a lawful child, and your father has a large estate to dispose of, then you will see that it is right and just, and no more than what you have reason to expect; that it is necessary, and that this necessity is the importance of the subject, you will at once see that this importance is a reason, yea an evidence that you have a right to expect it. I called on you to prove that no revelation was needed; I acknowledged that if none was necessary, a being of infinite wisdom would make none. You venture to say, that the "only evidence that reason can have of the necessity of divine revelation is its truth." It is believed, sir, that this hypothesis involves too much. It is saying that reason can discern the necessity of nothing until it obtains it, whereas the truth is evidently the other side of the assertion. We are frequently experiencing the necessity of things which we have not already attained, and by this want we are incited to use the means by which we finally obtain them.--"Ask, and ye shall receive, seek, and ye shall find, knock, and it shall be opened unto you," &c. It is believed, and no doubt it may be argued with success, that the moral and religious state of man really required a divine revelation. Never did the parched ground, the withering plant, the thirsty herds need the showers from heaven, more than man, that WORD of life which descended as the rain and distilled as the dew, when the gospel was published by a cloud of faithful witnesses, called of God for that purpose. After acknowledging that your words admit of the construction which I gave them respecting the apostles stating no more than what was substantially true, you inform me that you meant something very different; then, sir, it seems you must mean that they stated that which is not true. And if so, why do you not prove wherein they testified falsely, which would at once cast their bands from us? By this mean you would show that their testimony is deserving of no credit.