The Eclipse of Faith; Or, A Visit to a Religious ScepticRogers, Henry
Religion
The Eclipse of Faith; Or, A Visit to a Religious Sceptic
Rogers, Henry
Skepticism -- Controversial literature
To conclude; I must say that Mr. Newman, in his account of the genesis
of religion, does himself in effect admit (as Harrington has remarked)
an "external revelation," though not in a book. For what else is that
apparatus of external influences by which the several preparatory or
auxiliary emotions are awakened, and the development of your "spiritual
faculty" effected?--contact with the outward world,--with visible and
material nature,--the instruction of the living voice! You acknowledge
all this without derogation, as you imagine, to the sublime and divine
functions of the indwelling "spiritual" power, why this rabid, this, I
might almost say, puerile (if I ought not rather to say fanatical),
hatred of the very notion of a "book-revelation"?
Let us confess that, if a revelation be possible at all, it cannot be
more worthy of God to give one even from "within" than in such a shape
as a "book"; since without a "BOOK" man remains an idolater, in spite of
his fine "spiritual faculties," and a barbarian, in spite of his
sublime intellect; in fact, not much better than the beasts, in spite
of all those noble capacities which, although they are in him, are as
it were hopelessly locked up till he has obtained this key to their
treasures.
Nor do I think that the invectives of the modern spiritualists on this
point are particularly becoming, when we reflect not only that they
freely give mankind what Harrington declares to be to him, and I must
say are equally to me, their "book-revelations," but in very deed, as
he truly affirms, have given us nothing else. It has been much the same
with all who have rejected historical Christianity, from Lord Herbert's
time downwards.
I paused, and Fellowes mused. At last he said, "I cannot feel convinced
that the 'absolute religion' is (as Mr. Parker says) essentially the
same in all men, and internally revealed. The want exists in all, and
there must, according to the arrangements of universal nature, be the
supply; just as the eye is for the light, and the light is for the eye.
As he says, 'we feel instinctively it must be so.'"
"Unhappily," said Harrington, "Mr. Parker says that many things must
be which we find are not, and this among the number. At least I, for
one, shall not grant that the sort of spiritual 'supply' which is
to the Calmuck, or the savage 'besmeared with the blood of human
sacrifices,' at all resembles that uniform light which is made
for all people's eyes."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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