Mysticism and Rationalism here meet on the same ground,
and Plotinus and Cousin are at one.

[Footnote 76: "Hist. of Philos.," vol. i. p. 148.]

[Footnote 77: Ibid., vol. i. p. 216.]

[Footnote 78: Morell, "Hist. of Philos.," p. 661.]

V. The fifth hypothesis offered in explanation of the religious
phenomena of the world is that they had their origin _in_ EXTERNAL
REVELATION, _to which reason is related as a purely passive organ, and
Ethnicism as a feeble relic_.

This is the theory of the school of "dogmatic theologians," of which the
ablest and most familiar presentation is found in the "Theological
Institutes" of R. Watson.[79] He claims that all our religious knowledge
is derived from _oral revelation alone_, and that all the forms of
religion and modes of worship which have prevailed in the heathen world
have been perversions and corruptions of the one true religion first
taught to the earliest families of men by God himself. All the ideas of
God, duty, immortality, and future retribution which are now possessed,
or have ever been possessed by the heathen nations, are only broken and
scattered rays of the primitive traditions descending from the family of
Noah, and revived by subsequent intercourses with the Hebrew race; and
all the modes of religious worship--prayers, lustrations,
sacrifices--that have obtained in the world, are but feeble relics,
faint reminiscences of the primitive worship divinely instituted among
the first families of men. "The first man received the knowledge of God
by sensible converse with him, and that doctrine was transmitted, with
the confirmation of successive manifestations, to the early ancestors of
all nations."[80] This belief in the existence of a Supreme Being was
preserved among the Jews by continual manifestations of the presence of
Jehovah. "The intercourses between the Jews and the states of Syria and
Babylon, on the one hand, and Egypt on the other, powers which rose to
great eminence and influence in the ancient world, was maintained for
ages. Their frequent dispersions and captivities would tend to preserve
in part, and in part to revive, the knowledge of the once common and
universal faith."[81] And the Greek sages who resorted for instruction
to the Chaldean philosophic schools derived from thence their knowledge
of the theological system of the Jews.[82] Among the heathen nations
this primitive revelation was corrupted by philosophic speculation, as
in India and Ch