experiences of "spiritual insight." It this be Mr. Newman's solution
of our difficulties, it is utterly nugatory. It is not to dissect
the soul, "its sorrows and aspirations"; it is merely to give us
the pathology--perhaps the morbid pathology--of Mr. Newman's soul;
its sorrows and its aspirations. If the answer merely respected the
practical value of a theory of spiritual sentiments, which all
acknowledged, then Mr. Newman's answer might have some force; for
certainly, only he who reduced that theory to practice, or attempted
to do so, would have a right to conclude against the experience of
him who did. But it is obvious that the question affects the theory
itself, and especially the consciousness of those terms of possible
communion with God, those relations of the soul to him, on the
reception of which all the said spiritual experience must depend.

How, then, stands the argument? I ask how I shall know the intimation
of the spiritual faculty, which renders all "external revelation" an
impertinence? I am told, with delicious vagueness, that I must gaze on
the phenomena of spiritual consciousness; I say I exercise earnest and
sincere self-scrutiny, and that I can discern nothing but shadowy forms,
most of which do not answer to those which these new spiritualists
describe; and then Mr. Newman turns round and says, that the unspiritual
nature cannot discern them! What is this but to give up the only
question of any importance to humanity,--which is not what are Mr.
Newman's spiritual phenomena; if they are known to himself, it is
well; he has been very long in discovering them, in spite of the
clearness of the internal revelation;--but what are those of man? In
the former be all, Mr. Newman is safe indeed; he is intrenched in his
own peculiar consciousness, of which I am quite willing to admit
that all other men (as well as I) are inadequate judges. But the
monograph of a solitary enthusiast is of the least possible consequence