Theodore Parker says, "If a fact depends upon revelation, it is not eternally true, and if it is not eternally true it is no truth at all." Profound philosophy indeed!--as if eternally true, and sufficiently known were just the same thing. To use {78} a familiar illustration, because vaccination would always have prevented the small pox, if it had been known, therefore the world is under no obligation to Jenner for informing us of the fact. Newman adds in another place, "I cannot receive instruction from another being." Again, "Neither God nor man can reveal any religious truths to our minds." Parker says, "On His (God's) word or as His second, be he whom he may, I can accept nothing" (_Parker's Discourse page_ 209). Now we are tempted to ask, who are these wonderful prodigies, so incapable of receiving instruction from anybody? And to our amazement we learn that some forty or fifty years ago, they made their appearance among mankind as little squalling babies, without insight enough to know their own names or who they were, or where they came from, and were actually dependent on an external revelation, from their nurses, for sense enough to find their mothers' breasts. And as they grew a little larger, they learned the art of speaking articulate sounds, by external revelation: viz., hearing and repeating sounds made by others. Further, on a certain day they had a book revelation made to them, in the shape of a ten cent primer, and received their first lessons by the instructions of another. They had not then the least "insight," or "spiritual faculty," or "mighty transcendent soul," by which they could learn all things in and of themselves. Faith in the word of their teachers was absolutely the only means by which they learned to speak, read and write. {79} But this is not half their indebtedness to external revelation. They admit that a Feejee cannibal has just the same "mighty and transcendent soul" that they themselves have. How, then, does it happen that Newman, Emerson and Parker, and all their followers, who are too proud to be taught of God, are not assembled around a cannibal's oven, smearing their faces with the blood and feasting themselves on the limbs of women and children? Is it not, after all, the revelations of God and the teachings depending thereon that make the whole difference between the civilized American and his Feejee brother?