On the outward evidence, however, we can not at present dwell, since it is with the reasoning of these charlatans we design that our brief strictures shall be mainly occupied. In this, too, we find the proof of falsehood. For we return again to our text--the marvelous may be believed, the absurd no amount of evidence can prove. And here some thoughts suggest themselves to which we must give expression. What amount of solid thinking, what discrimination of ideas, what right knowledge of words, what degree of logical training, which, although not the discoverer of truth, is the surest guard against error--in a word, what amount of general, solid, mental culture must there be in an age distinguished for the extensive circulation and approbation of such works as Davis's Revelations of Nature, and Davis's Great Harmonia, and Dodd's Psychology, &c., &c.? Could it have been so when Butler wrote his immortal Analogy; or, farther back, when Howe preached his Living Temple as evening lectures to a country congregation, and Baxter's tracts were found in every hamlet in England? Could it have been so in our own land, when Edwards preached his deep theology to plain men in plain New England villages? The marvelous, we may well suppose, would have had no lack of believers in those days. But would such absurdities in reasoning have ever gained currency in those thinking though little scientific periods? With all our talk of science, and progress, and universities, and common schools, and the schoolmaster being abroad in the land, there must be, somewhere, something wrong in our most modern ideas and modern modes of education. Is not the physical element too predominant, and is it not to the common smatterings in this department that such a pretended spiritualism, yet real materialism, is directly to be traced? A superficial sciolism, extensive enough in its facts, but utterly hollow in its philosophy, is the food with which the common mind is every where crammed even to satiety, while there is such a serious lack of the logical, the theological, the Biblical, the classical, the historical--in short, of those elements which must furnish the foundation of all right thinking, and without which other knowledge is more likely to lead to error than to truth.