ery intelligible
word he speaks or writes.

There is living on Martha's Vineyard an old man who has never been off
the island, and the extent of his knowledge is bounded by the confines
of his home. He has been told of a war between the North and South, but
as he had never heard the din of battle, nor seen any soldiers, he
considered it a hoax. He is utterly unable to read, and is ignorant to
the last degree. A good story is told of his first and only day at
school. He was quite a lad when a lady came to the district, where his
father lived, to teach school. He was sent, and as the teacher was
classifying the school, he was called upon in turn and interrogated as
to his studies. Of course he had to say he had never been to school, and
knew none of his letters. The schoolmistress gave him a seat on one side
until she had finished the preliminary examination of the rest of the
scholars. She then called him to her and drew on the blackboard the
letter A, and told him what it was, and asked him to remember how it
looked. He looked at it a moment, and then inquired:

"H-h-how do you know it's A?"

The teacher replied that when she was a little girl she had been to
school to an old gentleman, who told her so.

The boy eyed the A for a moment and then asked:

"H-h-how do you know but he l-l-lied?"

The teacher could not get over this obstacle, and the poor boy was sent
home as incorrigible.

Mr. Emerson, and the whole school of those who despise instruction, had
better appoint this man their prophet of the inner light, and endow
Martha's Vineyard as the Penikese of skepticism.

But the knowledge of letters is not half of their indebtedness to
external revelation. For they will not deny that a Fiji cannibal has
just the same "insight," "spiritual faculty," "mighty and transcendent
soul," "self-consciousness," or any other name by which they may dignify
our common humanity, which they themselves possess. How does it happen,
then, that these writers are not assembled around the cannibal's oven,
smearing their faces with the blood, and feasting themselves on the
limbs of women and children? The inner nature of the cannibal and of the
Rationalist is the same--whence comes the difference of character and
conduct? And the inner light, too, is the same; for they assure us that
"inspiration, like God's omnipresence, is coextensive with the race." Is
it not, after all, mere external revelation, in the shape of
education--aye,