litate even
against that. Think of the frequent and signal checks to
civilization; its transference from seat to seat; the decay of races
once celebrated for knowledge and art; the inundations of barbarism
from time to time;--these things alone might make a sober mind
pause before he predicted for the entire race a certain progress
even in art and science. Experience would at most justify a
philosopher in saying. "Perhaps, yes; perhaps no." But the argument
becomes incomparably more doubtful when we come to "religion," and
especially that particular form of it which such writers as Messrs.
Parker and Newman believe will be preeminent and universal; towards
which consummation it does not appear at present that the smallest
conceivable advance has been made; since, with the exception of that
infinitesimal party, of which they are among the chief, the immense
majority of mankind persist in rejecting the sufficiency of the
"internal" oracle, and are still found as strongly convinced as ever
both of the possibility and necessity of an "external" revelation,
and that, in some shape or other, it has been given! Nay, the facts,
so far as we have any, seem all the other way; for no sooner had men
been put approximately in possession of the pure "spiritual truth,"
which both Mr. Newman and Mr. Parker suppose to be characteristic
in larger measure of Judaism and Christianity than of any other
religion, than they busily began the work, not of improvement, but
of corruption. The Jews corrupted their pure monotheistic truths
into what these writers believe the fables, legends, miracles, and
absurd dogmas of the Old Testament: and, as if that were not enough,
proceeded to bury them in the huge absurdities of the Rabbinical
traditions; the Christians, in like manner, corrupted the yet purer
truths, which these writers affirm Christianity teaches, with what
they also affirm to be the load of myth, fiction, false history,
and monstrous doctrine, which make up nine tenths of the New
Testament: and, as if that were not enough, proceeded, just as did
the Jews, to "expand" the New Testament itself into the worse than
Rabbinical traditions of the Papacy! From approximate "spiritual
truth" to the supposed legends and false dogmas of the Pentateuch,
from the supposed legends and dogmas of the Pentateuch to the
absurdities of the Talmud;--again, from the approximate "spiritual
truth" of Christianity to the supposed legends and fanciful doctrines