ly certify us,) I feel that I am much more indebted to
those influences from design, which these writers made so light of,
than to any clearness in the imperfect intuition: for if I found--and
surely this is the true test--the traces of design less conspicuous
in the external world, confusion there, as in the moral and in both
greater than is now found in either; I extremely doubt whether the
faintest surmise of such a Being would have suggested itself to me.
But be that as it may; as to their other cardinal sentiments,--the
nature of my relations to this Being,--his placability; if offended,
--the terms of forgiveness, if any,--whether, as these gentlemen
affirm, he is accessible to all, without any atonement or
mediator;--as to all this, I solemnly declare, that, apart from
external instruction; I cannot by interrogating my racked spirit,
catch even a murmur. That it must be faint, indeed, in other men,
so faint as to render the pretensions of the certitude of the
internal revelation, and its independence of all external revelation,
perfectly preposterous, I infer from this,--that they have, for the
most part, arrived at diametrically opposite conclusions from those
of these interpreters of the spiritual revelation. As to the
articles, indeed; of man's immortality and a future state, it would
be truly difficult for my "spiritual insight" to verify theirs; for,
according to Mr. Parker, his "insight" affirms that man is immortal,
and Mr. Newman's "insight" declares nothing about the matter!

Nor is my consciousness, so far as I can trace it, mine only. This
painful uncertainty has been the confession of multitudes of far
greater minds; they have been so far from contending that we have
naturally a clear utterance on these great questions, that they
have acknowledged the necessity of an external revelation; and
mankind in general, so far from thinking or feeling such light
superfluous, have been constantly gasping after it, and adopted
almost any thing that but bore the name.

What, then, am I to think of this all-sufficient revelation from
within?

There is, indeed, an amusing answer of Mr. Newman's to the difficulty:
but then it formally surrenders the whole argument. He says to those
who say they are unconscious of those facts of spiritual pathology
which he describes in his work on the "Soul," that the consciousness
of the spiritual man is not the less true, that the unspiritual man is
not privy to it; and this m