it, and approve it with a text, Hiding the grossness with fair
ornament?"

In glancing at the cause of this unchanged susceptibility to
religious credulity--unchanged while the world has been making
such strides in the acquisition of exact information--we may find
a summing up of the situation in Macaulay's blunt declaration
that "natural theology is not a progressive science; a Christian
of the fifth century with a Bible is on a par with a Christian of
the nineteenth century with a Bible. The "orthodox" believer in
that Bible can only seek a better understanding of it by studying
it himself and accepting the deductions of other students.
Nothing, as the centuries have passed, has been added to his
definite knowledge of his God or his own future existence. When,
therefore, some one, like a Swedenborg or a Joseph Smith, appears
with an announcement of an addition to the information on this
subject, obtained by direct revelation from on high, he supplies
one of the greatest desiderata that man is conscious of, and we
ought, perhaps, to wonder that his followers are not so numerous,
but so few. Progress in medical science would no longer permit
any body like the College of the Physicians of London to
recognize curative value in the skull of a person who had met
with a violent death, as it did in the seventeenth century; but
the physician of the seventeenth century with a pharmacopoeia was
not "on a par with" a physician of the nineteenth century with a
pharmacopoeia.

Nor has man changed in his mental susceptibilities as the
centuries have advanced. It is a failure to recognize this fact
which leads observers like Ferris to find it so marvellous that a