"I shall be curious to know," said I, interrupting him, "what you will
reply to that argument?"

Reply to it, said he, eagerly; does it require any reply?--However, I
will read what I have written. Is it not plain, that while Mr. Newman
is professedly anatomizing the spiritual nature of man, as man,--the
functions and revelations of that inward oracle which supersedes and
anticipates all external revelations--he is, in fact, anatomizing his
own? What title has he, when avowedly explaining the phenomena of the
religious faculty which he asserts to be inherent in humanity,--though
how they should need explaining, if his theory be true, I know not,--what
title has he, when men deny that they are conscious of the facts he
describes, to raise refuge in his own private revelations, and that of
the few whose privilege it is to be "born again" by a mysterious law
which he says it is impossible for us to investigate? "We cannot
pretend," he says, "to sound the mystery whence comes the new birth,
in certain souls. To reply, 'The Spirit bloweth where He listeth,'
confesses the mystery, and declines to explain it. But it is evident
that individuals in Greece, in the third century before the Christian
era, were already moving towards an intelligent heart-worship or
had even begun to practise it!" (Soul, p.64)
High time, I think, that after some thousands of years some few
individuals should begin to manifest the phenomena of the universal
revelation from within, if such a thing be!

This is not to delineate the religions nature of humanity, but to
reveal--yes, and to reveal externally--the religious nature of the
elect few,--and few they are indeed,--who, by a mysterious infidel
Calvinism, are permitted to attain, by direct intuition, and
independent of all external revelation, the true sentiments and