No difficulty is encountered, so long as the _inward_ and the _outward_ rule of religion agree,--by whatever names men call them,--the Spirit and the Word--or Reason and the Church,--or Conscience and Authority. None need settle which of the two rules is the greater, so long as the results coincide: in fact, there is no controversy, no struggle, and also probably no progress. A child cannot guess whether father or mother has the higher authority, until discordant commands are given; but then commences the painful necessity of disobeying one in order to obey the other. So, also, the great and fundamental controversies of religion arise, only when a discrepancy is detected between the inward and the outward rule: and then, there are only two possible solutions. If the Spirit within us and the Bible (or Church) without us are at variance, _we must either follow the inward and disregard the outward law; else we must renounce the inward law and obey the outward_. The Romanist bids us to obey the Church and crush our inward judgment: the Spiritualist, on the contrary, follows his inward law, and, when necessary, defies Church, Bible, or any other authority. The orthodox Protestant is better and truer than the Romanist, because the Protestant is not like the latter, consistent in error, but often goes right: still he _is_ inconsistent as to this point. Against the Spiritualist he uses Romanist principles, telling him that he ought to submit his "proud reason" and accept the "Word of God" as infallible, even though it appear to him to contain errors. But against the Romanist the same disputant avows Spiritualist principles, declaring that since "the Church" appears to him to be erroneous, he dares not to accept it as infallible. What with the Romanist he before called "proud reason," he now designates as Conscience, Understanding, and perhaps the Holy Spirit. He refused to allow the right of the Spiritualist to urge, that _the Bible_ contains contradictions and immoralities, and therefore cannot be received; but he claims a full right to urge that _the Church_ has justified contradictions and immoralities, and therefore is not to be submitted to. The perception that this position is inconsistent, and, to him who discerns the inconsistency, dishonest, is every year driving Protestants to Rome. And _in principle_ there are only two possible religions: the Personal and the Corporate; the Spiritual and the External. I do not mean to say that in Romanism there is nothing but what is Corporate and External; for that is impossible to human nature: but that this is what the theory of their argument demands; and their doctrine of Implicit[4] (or Virtual) Faith entirely supersedes intellectual perception as well as intellectual conviction. The theory of each church is the force which determines to what centre the whole shall gravitate. However men may talk of spirituality, yet let them once enact that the freedom of