press this point to the absurd conclusion which is inevitable, that no historical fact, no human invention, no expression of the countenance, no virtuous or vicious deeds are trustworthy or credible, as revelations of the human spirit, which are essential parts of spiritual truth, as the revelations of the great universal Spirit God. But we confine ourselves to this extraordinary statement, so far as it concerns our Divine knowledge. If no external revelation concerning God be authoritative, that is, truthful or trustworthy, whence do we derive our knowledge of God? An atheist may say we have none; but Mr. Newman is a theist, and his Essay on the Soul is expressly designed to show us whence we derive our conceptions of God. To him, therefore, we appeal with confidence, yet with amazement, when we think of the suicidal felony which his reasoning commits. He believes that we have a knowledge of God, which is correct. Then the source of that knowledge the revelation conveying it-must be authoritative. What is it? It must be either external or internal. But if it be external, then an authoritative external revelation is essentially possible to man. Now it might have been that Mr. Newman was a believer in innate ideas, and i.nagined all our knowledge of God to be the illumination of certain impresses originally stamped on the soul. If so, he would have escaped the battue of our argument. But he is no réchauffoir of wornout theories. He knows God from the revelation he has made of himself in the universe. Treating of the argument from design, he writes: "Consequently, such fitnesses as meet our view on all sides, bring a reasonable conviction that design lies beneath them. To confess this is to confess the doctrine of an intelligent Creator, although we pretend not to understand any thing concerning the mode, stages, or time of creation. Adding now the conclusions drawn from the order of the universe, we have testimony adapted to the cultivated judgment, that there is a boundless, eternal, unchangeable, designing mind, not without whom this system of things coheres; and this mind we call God." In this passage there is the confession that even the existence of God is revealed to us by the external universe, and that certain features of his character are portrayed there also. In other sections, Mr. Newman proceeds to show how

the sublime attributes of wisdom and goodness are likewise manifest in the harmony, certitude, and over-ruling beneficence of nature. He further visibly shows how the religious feelings, in their lowest, as well as their noblest, expression, are awakened by contact with the solemnities and grandeurs of nature-how the deep shadow of awe creeps over the spirit beneath the hushed stillness and gloomy vastness of night-how the sense of mys terious joy kindles again with the bright dawn of the sun among the crimson-dyed clouds of the east, or with the glorious coming of spring, when it rises disentombed and radiant with Elysian beauty from the death of winter. The sense of reverential wonder, admiration, order, whatever feeling seems to make us even dimly cognizant of an infinite spiritual Presence, only palpitates into life when the soul is touched by these external revelations of His majesty and love. According, therefore, to Mr. Newman's own diagnosis of our spiritual conceptions, every fact that conveys to our mind certain or authoritative knowledge of the being of God, or that thrills our soul with a felt but uncomprehended sense of his presence, is external to us.

What, then, can be his meaning, when, in the next sentence to that we have so often quoted, he says: "What God reveals to us, he reveals within, through the medium of our moral and spiritual senses"? Are those fitnesses which he asserts to prove design, and to prove an intelligent cause, all lodged within him? Is the order of the universe, whose testimony proclaims. a boundless, unchangeable, eternal, designing Mind, wrapped up and condensed in the human soul? Is man the universe? If not, then Mr. Newman is convicted of most willful self-annihilation. His theistic essay is an attempt to show that God reveals himself externally, yet authoritatively, to man in the material universe; and yet he madly lifts his hand to demolish all his fair reasoning, by the presumptuous and unreasoned dogma, that an authoritative external revelation of spiritual truth is an essential impossibility.

Against Mr. Newman's dogma we maintain diametrically the reversethat any revelation of spiritual truth, to be authoritative, must be external. We exclude, of course, the mere knowledge of our own existence, which is doubtless a part of spirtual truth, and is given in the fact of

consciousness. But with that exception, all other spiritual truth concerning our fellow-men - other finite spirits-the nature of human existence after death-and the great God, must be externally revealed to us. Limiting the question again to our Divine knowledge if a man be shut up from acquaintance with the works of God, what knowledge can he possibly have of his will and power? He may dream of these things, his imagination may intoxicate him with gorgeous reveries concerning him, from all positive and well-assured knowledge of whom he is grievously debarred. But those hallucinations of the fancy-the only possible products of an internal revelation are surely not authoritative. An authoritative revelation must consist in facts, not fancies, and must therefore be external not internal. To a certain extent, indeed, the mind itself is a revelation of God; for, like all other created things, it is an effect, and contains some of the qualities of its Divine cause. If, therefore, a man shut up from other sources of knowledge were minutely to examine this, he might arrive at accurate, though limited, conceptions of God, deduced from the facts brought under his apprehension. But even in this case the revelation is external to him. He examines his mind as a thing apart from himself. It is an organized structure of subtile and awful properties. Different faculties, processes, and emotions belong to it; but these are not isolated, and held apart from each other. They are all united to the central will, and interwoven by the unconscious and unsearchable force of mental association. They thus hold definite and fixed relations among themselves, and are kept in perpetual sympathy with each other. His mind, therefore, he learns to be an organization as much as a plant, or the human body, or the Kóoμos, being a system of powers which are connected and sympathetically developed according to predetermined and unchanging laws. But when a man so examines his own mind, the powers and the structure of which have not originated in himself, and when he is compelled by the examination to admit a supreme originating Cause, and to descry something of His character, the mental process is precisely the same as in examining any foreign object with the same intent. The construction of the mind is viewed as aloof from his own will, and exposed to his inspection,

as though it were quite a separate object from himself; and the information he receives from his mental study comes to him as a new and objective revelation, just as much as though it were drawn from the external world; the only difference being, that in the one case the means of communication are memory and consciousness, and in the other, memory and perception. It is very certain, this knowledge of God, derived from reflection on the anatomie vivante of our own mind, is not what Mr. Newman means by "the revealing of spiritual truth within the soul." But to secure both the flank and rear of our advancing arguments, we may grant, that so much as a man can learn of God from the formative history of his own mind, (though this will be the unlikeliest and latest source of Divine knowledge,) may be said to be furnished by an internal revelation. Plainly, all other knowledge must be revealed to us from without, from those facts of the material or spiritual universe which are brought under our cognizance.

It might be imagined that Mr. Newman, like other skeptics, felt the essential impossibility of which he speaks to attach to a revelation of God, which was distinct from the revelation of nature. If this had been his position, we must then have proved the possibility and likelihood of a supernatural revelation. But it is not so. His dogma reaches further back than that, and asserts that no statement of facts concerning God-whether these facts are apprehended in nature, or are supersensual -can be authoritative; and in reply, we affirm, that it is authoritative if it be true, of whatsoever nature the facts may be; that if irrefutably proved to be true by the corroborate evidence accompanying them, the facts stated must be accepted and believed by him, at the peril of the charge of irrationality; and that this is all the authority which a revelation of scriptural or any sort of truth can possibly claim, namely, an authority of evidence which will enforce belief. Now the facts recorded which contain spiritual truth, because they exhibit the character of God, may be remote from our immediate perception, whether they pertain to this state of things or another. The evidence of belief is seldom verified by an appeal to our own observation, but rests upon the testimony of others. The immense majority of facts which Mr. Newmar ac

cepts as revealing to him the power, wisdom, and beneficence of God, have not been explored or experienced by himself. The sublime order of the universe, as unfolded in the Newtonian system, he believes on the testimony of those who have evolved that system, by the rigid application of mechanical laws to the appearances of the heavenly bodies; yet, upon their testimony, he credits that fact, which reveals to him most distinctly and overpoweringly what we may term the physical and intellectual character, or the material force and contriving skill of God. Pursuing the tracks of human history to learn the moral character of God, all the facts which he assumes to exhibit this character are adopted in faith of the testimony which records them. Beyond the narrow range of our own observation, the certainty or authority of every fact is judged by the worth of the evidence attesting it. This law is irreversible, and must be applied with strict impartiality both to spiritual and material truth. The statements of the Bible, even as to spiritual facts, such as what God is affirmed to have said, or to have done, must be rigidly tried at this tribunal, and accepted and rejected, according to this imperious necessity, by one standard, namely, the validity of the testimony vouching the truth of these facts. The specific character of the facts themselves must not weigh a scruple in the balance. Bacon has denounced the arrogance of those who would determine on purely theoretic and à priori grounds what facts of nature are to be allowed or disallowed, and has shown the office of man in search of truth to be that of servant and interpreter; and like humility is surely required in the search after spiritual as after physical truth. Our elective fancy must not become a divining-rod, the despotic nod of which is to settle the fate of any fact in despite of the plainest confirming or opposing evidence. The age of such intellectual despotism has passed away, and it ill becomes Mr. Newman to imitate, by his imaginary impossibilities, the hierarchy of the Roman Church in Galileo's time.

We claim, therefore, for the Bible the authority of truth, which is all the authority that is conceivable upon the ground of its evidences, and smile at the presumptuous impotence of Mr. Newman's protest, that would foreclose the only just decision by his whimsical unphilosophical

objection to the kind of truth the Bible contains. We are aware that, properly speaking, the testimony in support of much that the Bible reveals is two-fold; first, the human testimony which proves God to speak, or otherwise convey supernatural truth, in the Bible; secondly, the testimony of God himself. Mr. Newman's dogma disavows the worth even of the latter; for if it were incontrovertibly proved that God had communicated some spiritual fact to his creatures, yet Mr. Newman's theory of essential impossibility would prevent him from relying on the testimony of God as authoritative. We do not follow him, as we do not envy him, in his boastful-it also seems to us, blasphemous-incredulity. The testimony of man may be authoritative, because true. If the testimony of God be not authoritative, it can only be because it is false. We have said before that it is not the possibility, or even the fact, of supernatural revelation which Mr. Newman disputes, but its authoritativeness; and we review and sum up our answer in these words: With regard to the spiritual world, the only authority is truth; and if God has given an external revelation, it is authoritative, if true; and if not true, then God is false.

There is, however, a metaphysical fallacy mixed up with Mr. Newman's speculations on the Bible, which is thus introduced by him: "Some assume, as a first principle, that the mind is made for truth, or that our faculties are veracious. Perhaps the real first principle here rather is, that no higher arbiter of truth is accessible to man, than the mind of man." Now, his meaning in the latter clause, we suspect, is the exact converse, instead of being a more nicely phrased and accurate definition, of the first principle which all men- not some - necessarily assume in the practical conduct of life, and ought to assume in their rational speculations. He has fairly hocussed this first principle into the old doctrine of Protagoras, "Av0pwπ Távrov μérpov, which is its contradictory, and issues in the denial of all truth whatsoever. Accordingly he intimates, that to attempt to prove the infallibility of the Bible is a blunder; for "no proof can have a certainty higher than the accuracy and veracity of the faculties which conduct the proof;" and again he affirms "that our certainty in Divine truth can not be more certain than the veracity of

our inward organs of discernment." These sentences, though muffled in mist, are mere jargon, if they do not insinuate that our faculties are not "accurate and veracious." Likewise, from the tenor of his writings we infer that the real ground on which he disputes the possibility of an authoritative external revelation is, that the faculties by which it is apprehended are not trustworthy; and therefore no revelation, whatever it may be in itself, can become authoritative to us. He must see, however, that this fearful insinuation reaches infinitely further than to the belief of a spiritual revelation, and dissipates with its malignant touch the entire structure of human knowledge. If the faculties of reasoning exercised in weighing the value of testimony be not accurate, their decisions are vitiated in every instance in which they are applied, and "Historic Doubts," not only respecting Napoleon Bonaparte, but respecting the recent change of ministry or the Indian Rebellion, are unavoidable. If, moreover, these faculties are false, all other faculties must be so likewise-perception, memory, association; and man is proved to be the sport of an immitigable delusion, fondly dreaming of the possibility of truth, and laboring in its search, while, by the congenital vice of his mind, falsehood must be his eternal portion. The disappointed passion and revolving rack of Ixion become the faint emblems of his mocked existence. Such Pyrrhonism sweeps away authoritative truth, not only from the sphere of religion, but also from the sphere of history, science, and even of our own consciousness; for when a man dooms the faculties of his own soul, there is no longer any truth for him. We care not for any insinuation or flaunting profession of this doctrine; for, when once detected and exposed, it is harmless. The mind revolts from it with instinctive horror, and will never be seduced to accept a doctrine which treasonably condemns and nullifies itself. But we do care for and protest against Mr. Newman's application of this doctrine in the particular instance in which it suited his purpose, while he repudiates it every where else. If the faculties of men are veracious, and can give us authoritative certain truth in these matters, there is no essential impossibility that they may do so in the matter of Divine revelation. If any information we receive of distant or bygone events be so

credibly sustained, that it may be relied upon as accurate and authoritative, so may the information we receive concerning God and the spiritual world. Mr. Newman believes that he has found a certain revelation of spiritual truth in the universe, and yet "his certainty therein can not be more certain than the veracity of his inward organs of discernment." If, then, this doctrine avails against the Bible, it equally avails against the revelation of nature, and neither of them can be authoritative. Further, if our faculties be suspected in the mere apprehension of an external revelation, how much more if our knowledge of God be entirely generated within by some mysterious intuitive process of these fallacious powers! Assuredly, if the inward organs of discernment be doubted in the belief and interpretation of an external revelation of spiritual truth, so as by their depravity to cancel its authority, these inward organs, which do not discern, but create spiritual truth, may likewise be doubted, especially since their very existence is dubious, and, if real, appertains only to a few spiritualists, the hierophants of humanity. If, therefore, on this ground, there be no authoritative external revelation, à fortiori, there is no internal, and so there is no authoritative revelation at all.

2. Mr. Newman affirms the same of moral as of spiritual truth-that an authoritative external revelation of it is impossible. This, however, is a very different proposition from the former. Let us endeavor to clearly understand it. The former proposition was, that God could not reveal spiritual truth in a form external to us, so as to authorize our belief in it upon the sole ground of his testimony. The present proposition is, that God can not enjoin moral duties upon us which we must acknowledge to be right and obligatory on the sole ground of the injunction, and apart from our judgment of their rectitude on other grounds. An authoritative law is one that authorizes our obedience to it; and this authority can only belong to it when we acknowledge it to be right, and therefore obligatory. Now this proposition differs from the former in this essential point. We have a faculty that decides upon the right or wrong of an action per se. We have not a faculty that decides upon the truth or falsehood of a fact per se. The authority of truth must be wholly external, because ground