"For themselves, perhaps, my friend," said Harrington, "and if they had kept it to themselves in many instances, probably the world would have been no loser. That they had it from within, is true,--if your theory is true. But to others, to the bulk of mankind, they have imparted this light; it has been to mankind an 'external revelation'; it is from without, not from within, that this light has been received, and that the boasted 'progress' of the race has been secured. It remains, therefore, only for your Christian opponent to ask, how it should be impossible that mankind should be indebted to an external revelation by God, when it is plain that they are indebted for the like from man! And whether it is not conceivable that, if Moses and Socrates and Paul could do so much for them, God could do a trifle more? You will say, perhaps, on the old plea, that these profounder spirits only made articulate that which already existed inarticulately in the hearts of those whom they addressed; that they only chafed into life the marble statue of Pygmalion,--the dormant principles and sentiments which had a home in the human heart before, only they were unluckily treated as strangers. Well; the same thing may the apologist for the Bible say,--merely adding, that it does more effectually the business of thus awakening 'dormant' powers, and giving a substantive form to the shadowy conceptions of mankind. But it is still, in either case, to the bulk of the world an external revelation, an outward aid which gives them the actual conscious possession of spiritual light, and secures the vaunted progress of humanity. Such are some of my difficulties respecting your theory of the impossibility and inutility of any and all external revelations. I must, in candor, say that our discussion has left them where they were." "There is one thing," he added, "about your system which I acknowledge would be consolatory to me if it were but true. If man be really in possession of an internal and universal revelation of moral and spiritual truth, you neither can nor need take any trouble to enlighten and convert him. It relieves one of all superfluous anxiety on that score."