of a peculiar quality and higher in degree. All true human knowledge in
moral matters rests on experience, internal or external, higher or lower,
on tradition, on language as the bearer of tradition, on revelation;
while that false, monstrous, and unconditioned science to which the pride
of human reason has always aspired, which would grasp at every thing at
once by one despotic clutch, and by a violent bound of logic bestride and
beride the ALL, is, and remains, an oscillating abortion that always
would be something, and always can be nothing. A living, personal, moral
God, the faith of nations, the watch-word of tradition, the cry of
nature, the demand of mind, received not invented, existing in the soul
not reasoned into it--this is the gravitating point of the moral world,
the only intelligible centre of any world; from which whatsoever is
centrifugal errs, and to which whatsoever is opposed is the devil.

Not private speculation, therefore, or famous philosophies of any kind,
but the living spiritual man, and the totality of the living flow of
sacred tradition on which he is borne, and with which he is encompassed,
are the two grand sources of "the philosophy of life." Let us follow these
principles, now, into a few of their wide-spread streams and multiform
historical branchings. First, the Bible clearly indicates what the
profoundest study of the earliest and most venerable literatures confirms,
that man was not created at first in a brutish state, crawling with a slow
and painful progress out of the dull slime of a half organic state into
apehood, and from apehood painfully into manhood; but he was created
perfect in the image of God, and has fallen from his primeval glory. This
is to be understood not only of the state of man before the Fall as
recorded in the two first chapters of Genesis; but every thing in the
Bible, and the early traditions of famous peoples, warrants us to believe,
that the first ages of men before the Flood, were spiritually enlightened
from one great common source of extraordinary aboriginal revelation; so