Under the same head will be included the grotesque devil-stories and other legends of the Middle Ages ...... Yet the dreadful alternative of gross superstition is this, that the graver view tends to cruel and horrible rites, while the fanciful and sportive sucks out the life-blood of devout feeling." (Ibid. pp. 14-16.) Then comes the sense of beauty: "This was strikingly illustrated in Greek sculpture. A statue of exquisite beauty, representing some hero, or an Apollo, because of its beauty, seemed to the Greeks a fit object of worship ...... An opposite danger is often remarked to accompany the use of all the fine arts as handmaids to religion; namely, that the would-be worshipper is so absorbed in mere beauty as never to rise into devotion." (Ibid. pp. 21, 23.) Then comes the sense of order; but, alas! Atheism and Pantheism, and other "degrading types," may be begotten of it! As I look at men thus tumbling into error along this wretched causeway to heaven, I seem to be viewing Addison's bridge of human life, with its broken arches, at each of which thousands are falling through. This way to the "celestial city" ought to be called the "Northwest Passage"; it has one, and only one, trait of your Christian path: "there will be few that find it." If, then, by the confession of these writers, the "false conceptions" and the "degraded types"--the result of what are as truly "principles" of man's nature as the supposed "spiritual faculty," only that this last always has the worst in the conflict--have universally, and for unknown ages, involved man in the darkest abysses of superstition, crime, and misery, surely external revelation is any thing but superfluous; and if impossible, so much the worse. The same truth is even formally evinced by the self-destructive course which both writers employ; for as the conditions of the development of our "spiritual nature," when not complied with, lead to all the deplorable consequences which they acknowledge, how do they propose to rectify them? Why, by "external" culture, proper discipline and training, judicious instruction, by enlightening mankind,--as we may suppose they are doing by these hopeful books of theirs! If man can do so much by his books, is it impossible that a book from God might do something more? But on this I will say nothing, since you tell me that you have heard attentively the conversation I had with my friend Fellowes the other day. I will therefore omit what I had written on this point ......