ntal to the human intellect and conscience,
and which when revealed were very distasteful (and not least to
you); but the assertion of a spiritual monopoly would assuredly
sound rather odd in one who professes, if I understand you, that
has given to man (for it is no discovery of any individual) an
internal and universal revelation! But of your possible limitations
of your universal spiritual revelation,--which all men 'naturally'
possess, but which the 'natural man' receiveth not,--we will talk
after. Sceptic as I am, I am not a sceptic who is reconciled to
scepticism. Meantime, you reject the Bible in toto, as an external
revelation of God, if I understand you."

"In toto; and I believe that it has received in this age its
death-blow."

"Ay, that is what the infidel has been always promising us; meantime,
they somehow perish, and it laughs at them. You remember, perhaps,
the words of old Woolston, so many fragments of whose criticism,
as those of many others, have been incorporated by Strauss. He had,
as he elegantly expresses it, 'cut out such a piece of work for the
Boylean lectures as should hold them tug as long as the ministry of
the letter should last'; for he too, you see, masked his infidelity
by a distinction between the 'letter' and the 'spirit,' though he
applied the convenient terms in a totally different sense. Poor soul!
The fundamental principles of his infidelity are surrendered by
Strauss himself. Similarly, a score of assailants of the Bible have
appeared and vanished since his day; each proclaiming, just as he
himself went to the bottom, that he had given the Bible its death-blow!
Somehow, however, that singular book continues to flourish, to
Propagate itself, to speak all languages, to intermingle more and
more with the literature of all civilized nations; while mankind
will not accept, slaves as they are, the intellectual freedom you
offer them. It is really very provoking; of what use is it to destroy
the Bible so often, when it lives the next minute? I have little doubt
your new attempts will end just like the labors of the Rationalists
of the Paulus school, so graphically described by the German writer
whom I have already referred to. 'It is sad, no doubt,' says he, or
something to the same effect, 'that, after fifty years' exegetical
grubbing, weeding, and pruning at 'the mighty primitive forest of
the Bible, the next generation should persist in saying that the
Rationalist had destroyed th