"I suppose not. However, how the world should need it, if your
principles be true, and every man brings into the world his own
particular lantern,--'Enter Moonshine,'--I do not quite understand;
or, if it is in need of such illumination not withstanding, why it
should not be possible for an external revelation to supply it
still better than your illuminati, I am equally unable to understand.
But let that pass. Mr. Newman concludes that the world does stand
in need of this illumination, and that it has had it at various
times. In is his opinion, is it not, that men began by being
polytheists and idolaters?"

"It is so; and surely all history bears out the theory."

"Many doubt it. I will not venture to give any opinion, except that
there are inexplicable difficulties, as usual, on both sides. Just now
I am quite willing to take his statement for granted, and suppose
that man in the infancy of his race was, in spite of the aid of his
very peculiar illumination,--which seems to have 'rayed out darkness,'
--as very a Troglodyte in civilization and religion as you (for the
special glory of his Creator, I suppose, and the honor of your
species) can wish him to have been. Well, man began by being a
polytheist, and very gradually emerged out of that pleasant condition
--or rather an infinitesimal portion of the race has emerged out of
it, into the better forms of idolatry--(poor wretch!), and from
thence to monotheism; that, in short, his polytheism is not the
corruption of his monotheism, but his monotheism an elevation of his
polytheism. Yet it is, after all, a cheerless 'progress,' which often
'advances backward.' Mr. Newman says that 'the law of God's moral
universe, as known to us, is that of progress; that we trace it from
old barbarism to the methodized Egyptian idolatry, to the more flexible