Take the Reverend Colonel Higginson, a man of good blood and rich natural gifts, one who, if he had been trained in a Christian school, and had had his mind elevated and expanded by the study of Christian dogmata, could hardly have failed to be one of the great men, if not the greatest man of his age. He has naturally true nobility of soul, rare intellectual power, and genius of a high order; yet he is so blinded, and so dwarfed in mind by his radicalism, that he can seriously say, "There is no affirmation except the belief in universal natural religion; all else is narrowness and sectarianism." He has, then, no views broader than nature, no aspirations that rise higher than nature, and labors under the delusion that men, reduced to nature alone, would really be elevated and ennobled. He has never learned that nature is not self-sufficing--is dependent; that it has both its origin and end as well as its medium in the supernatural, and could not act or subsist a moment without it--a truth which the Catholic child has learned before a dozen years old, and which is a simple commonplace with the Christian; so much so, that he rarely thinks it necessary to assert it, far less to prove it. This utterance of the reverend colonel is accepted by all the radicals. None of them get above second causes; for them all God and nature appear to be identical and indistinguishable; and this appears to be their grand and all-reconciling doctrine. Hence the religion which they propose has no higher origin than man, and no higher end than the natural development and well-being of man, individual and social, in this earthly life. It is the religion of humanity, not the religion of God, and man, not God, is obeyed and worshipped in it; yet it seems never to occur to these wise men and women that nature either separated from or identified with God vanishes into nothing, and their religion with it. But is a religion that is simply evolved from humanity, that has no element above the human, and is necessarily restricted to man in this life, and that contemplates neither fore nor after, higher, deeper, and more universal than Christianity which asserts for us the nature and essence of God, teaches us the origin and end of all things, the real relations of man to his Maker and to universal nature through all the degrees and stages of his existence? No; it is your naturism that is "narrowness and sectarianism."