"I am afraid that will not excuse their absurdity, because, as you admit, all book-revelation is impossible.--But further, supposing men to have made this strange blunder, it only shows that the 'moral and spiritual' could not be very clearly revealed within; and no wonder men began to think that perhaps it might come to them from without! When men begin to mistake blue for red, and square for round, and chaff for wheat, I think it is high time that they repair to a doctor outside them to tell them what is the matter with their poor brains. Meantime an external revelation is impossible?" "Certainly." "But men, however, have somehow perversely believed it very possible, and that, in some shape or other, it has been given?" "They have, I must admit." "Unhappy race! thus led on by some fatality, though not by the constitution of their nature (rather by some inevitable perversion of it), to believe as possible that which is so plainly impossible. O that it did not involve a contradiction to wish that God would relieve them from such universal and pernicious delusions, by giving them a book-revelation to show them that all book-revelations are impossible!" "That," said Fellowes, laughing, "would indeed be a novelty. Miracles would hardly prove that." "I think not," said Harrington. "But, as the poet says, 'some god or friendly man' may show the way. Pray, permit me to ask, did you always believe that a book-revelation was impossible?" "How can you ask the question?--you know that I was brought up, like yourself, in the reception of the Bible as the only and infallible revelation of God to mankind." "To what do you owe your emancipation from this grievous and universal error, which still infects, in this or some other shape, the myriads of the human race?" "I think principally to the work of Mr. Newman on the 'Soul,' and his 'Phases of Faith.'"