The Rights of Reason may at present be said to be in such a germ of their acknowledgment as were the rights of conscience three centuries ago. Mankind have not hitherto come to acquiesce in the idea of that parsimony of guidance vouchsafed to man, which is found to be the result of claiming for reason the power of calling all human thoughts before his tribunal, and seeing whether he has anything to object to them. Their idea has been that not only suggesting inspiration--(which it does not seem necessary that the advocate of the rights of reason should deny)--but guiding inspiration is given, given too to some rather than to others, and given in such a quality, as to dispense with the supervision of reason. A generation successive to many among whom this doctrine has been taught and believed, will not be prone to any decided rejection of it. Pride of species inclining to exaggerated human pretensions above other earthly creatures, and party pride inclining to exalt self and an associated confraternity into a superiority over the rest of mankind, and supplied with a traditional store of modes of thought and practice adapted to such exclusive pretensions, and other native tendencies of the human mind, persuade in the same direction. I have thought it suitable to premise this short sketch of the Rights of Reason, and the opponents of them, to an endeavor to answer your queries in a thoroughly reasonable way, a way which cannot be said to be the more fashionable one in the treatment of metaphysical questions. NOTES [1] Wilfrid Meynell, in his John Henry Newman, erroneously speaks of Charles Robert as the "youngest son." [2] This is a mistake. Owen in 1817 renounced the religions of the world, and proclaimed that man's character was formed for him not by him. But he was not an Atheist. End of Project Gutenberg's Essays in Rationalism, by Charles Robert Newman