These apologies, odious as they are, are necessary if the credit of the "spiritual faculty" and the "absolute religion" is to be at all preserved. But, unhappily, it is not a tone which can be consistently preserved. Sometimes the religions of mankind are all tolerable enough, from the presence of the all-consecrating element; and sometimes, in spite of this great antiseptic, they are represented as the rotten, putrid things they are! And then another answer, equally empty with the former, is hinted to save the credit of the darling oracle. Its due influence has been perverted, its just expansion prevented, by the influence of national religions, by the intervention of the "historical" and "traditional," by false and pernicious education;--these things, it seems, have poisoned the waters of spiritual life in their source, else they had gushed out of the hidden fountains of the heart pure as crystal! Yes, it is too plain; "Bibliolatry" and "Historical Religion," in some shape,--Vedas, Koran, or Bible,--have been the world's bane. Had it not been for these, I suppose, we should everywhere have heard the invariable utterance of "spiritual religion" in the one dialect of the heart. It is too certain that the world has found its spiritual "Babel": the one dialect of the heart is yet to be heard. But I am not sure that the apologetic vein would not be wiser. For what is this plea, but to acknowledge that man is so constituted that the boasted "religious sentiment," the "spiritual faculty,"--if it exist at all, and is any thing more than an ill-defined tendency, --instead of being a glorious light which anticipates all external revelation, and renders it superfluous, is, in fact, about the feeblest in our nature; which everywhere and always is seduced and debauched by the most trumpery pretensions of the "historical" and "traditional"! It is not so with people's eyes; it is not so with people's appetites; no parental influence or early instruction can make men think that green is blue, or stones and chalk good for food. Yet this glorious faculty uniformly yields,--goes into shivers in the encounter! I, at least, will grant to Mr. Parker all he says of the pernicious and detestable character of the infinite variety of "false conceptions of God," and to Mr. Newman all he says of the "degraded types" of religion; but then it was Man himself that framed all those "false conceptions," and all those "degraded types." How came he thus universally to triumph over that divinely implanted faculty of spiritual discernment, which, if it exist, must be the most admirable feature of humanity; which these writers tell us anticipates all external truth, but which, it seems, greedily swallows all external error? It almost universally submits to the most contemptible pretensions of a revelation, and acknowledges that it dares not to pronounce on that, even when false, of which, even when true, it is to be the sole source! There never was an