_I._ Please tell us then, if you can, something of the nature and objects of this new Divine Epiphany which you announce; and as you say it is a _Fourth_, please tell us, in brief, what were the preceding _Three_, the times of their occurrence, and how they are all distinguished from each other. _P._ The _First_ appealed only to the affections and the inner sense of the soul, and was the Dispensation of the most ancient Church, when God walked with man in the midst of the garden of his own interior delights, and when "Enoch walked with God and was not, for God took him." But as this sense of the indwelling presence of God was little more than a mere _emotion_, for which, in that period of humanity's childhood, there was no adequate, rational, and directive intelligence, men, in process of time, began to mistake _every_ delight as being divine and holy; thus they justified themselves in their _evil_ delights, or in the gratification of their lusts and passions, considering even these as all divine. [The "sons of God" marrying the "daughters of men."--_Gen._ vi. 2-4.] And as they possessed no adequate reasoning faculty to which appeals might be made for the correction of these tendencies, and thus no ground of reformation, the race gradually grew to such a towering height of wickedness that it had to be almost entirely destroyed. The _Second_ age or Dispensation, commencing with Noah, was distinctively characterized by the more special manifestation of God in outward types and shadows, in the _adyta_ of temples and other consecrated places and things, from which, as representative seats of the Divine Presence, and through inspired men, were issued _laws_ to which terrible penalties were annexed, as is exemplified by the law issued from Mount Sinai. The evil passions of men were thus put under restraint, and a rational faculty of discriminating between right and wrong--that is to say, a _Conscience_--was at the same time developed. But the sophistical use of these types and shadows (of which all ancient mythology is an outgrowth), and the accompanying perversion of the general conscience of mankind, gradually generated _Idolatry_ and _Magic_ with all their complicated evils, against which the Jewish Church, though belonging to the same general Dispensation, was specially instituted to react. Furthermore, as the mere restraints of penal law necessarily imply the existence in man of latent evils upon which the restraint is imposed, it is manifest that such a dispensation alone could not bring human nature to a state of perfection; and so a _Third_ was instituted, in which _God was manifested in the flesh_. That is to say, He became incarnate in one man who was so constituted as to embody in himself the qualitative totality of Human Nature, that through this one Man as the Head of the Body of which other men were the subordinate organs, He might become united with all others--so that by the spontaneous movings of the living