dictate of the "religious sentiment,"--one of the few universal
characteristics of all religion; another declares his "insight"
tells him nothing of the matter; one affirms that the supposed
chief "intuitions" of the "religious faculty"--belief in the
efficacy of prayer, the free will of man, and the immortality of
the soul--are at hopeless variance with intellect and logic; others
exclaim, and surely not without reason, that this casts upon our
faculties the opprobrium of irretrievable contradictions! As for those
"spiritualists"--and they are, perhaps, at present the greater
part--who profess, in some sense, to pay homage to the New Testament,
they are at infinite variance as to how much--whether 7 1/2, 30, or
50 per cent of its records--is to be received. Very few get so far
as the last. One man is resolved to be a Christian,--none more
so,--only he will reject all the peculiar doctrines and all the
supernatural narratives of the New Testament; another declares that
miracles are impossible and "incredible, per se"; a third thinks
they are neither the one nor the other, though it is
true that probably a comparatively small portion of those narrated in
the "book" are established by such evidence as to be worthy of credit.
Pray use your pleasure in the selection; and the more freely, as a
fourth is of opinion that, however true, they are really of little
consequence. While many extol in vague terms of admiration the deep
"spiritual insight" of the founders of Christianity, they do not trouble
themselves to explain how it is that this exquisite illumination left
them to concoct that huge mass of legendary follies and mystical
doctrines which constitute, according to the modern "spiritualism,"
the bulk of the records of the New Testament, and by which its authors
have managed to mislead the world; nor how we are to avoid regarding
them either as superstitious and fanatical fools or artful and
designing knaves, if nine tenths, or seven tenths, of what they record