“The strangest thing is to see the way in which, after parading this supposed ’artful dodge,’[5] which, I assure you, gentle reader, was all a perfect novelty to my consciousness,—­Mr. Newman goes on to say, that the author of the ‘Eclipse’ has altered the order of his sentences to suit a purpose.  He says:  ’The sentences quoted as 1, 2, 3, by him, with me have the order 3, 2, 1.’  I answer, that Harrington was simply anxious to set forth at the head of his argument, in the clearest and briefest form, the conclusions[6] he believed Mr. Newman to hold, and which he was going to confute.  He had no idea of any relation of subordination or dependence in the above sophisms, as I have just proved them to be, whether arranged as 3, 2, 1, or 1, 2, 3, or 2, 3, 1, or in any other order in which the possible permutations of three things, taken 3 and 3 together, can exhibit them; ex nihilo, nil fit; and three nonentities can yield just as little.  Jangle as many changes as you will on these three cracked bells, no logical harmony can ever issue out of them.”

Thus, because he does not see the validity of my argument, he is to pretend that I have offered none:  he is not to allow his readers to judge for themselves as to the validity, but they have to take his word that I am a very “queer” sort of logician, ready “for any feats of logical legerdemain.”

I have now to ask, what is garbling, if the above is not?  He admits the facts, but justifies them as having been convenient from his point of view; and then finds my charity to be “very grotesque,” when I do not know how, without hypocrisy, to avoid calling a spade a spade.

I shall here reprint the pith of my argument, somewhat shortened:—­

“No heaven-sent Bible can guarantee the veracity of God to a man who doubts that veracity.  Unless we have independent means of knowing that God is truthful and good, his word (if we be over so certain that it is really his word) has no authority to us:  hence no book revelation can, without sapping its own pedestal, deny the validity of our a priori conviction that God has the virtues of goodness and veracity, and requires like virtues in us. And in fact, all Christian apostles and missionaries, like the Hebrew prophets, have always confuted Paganism by direct attacks on its immoral and unspiritual doctrines, and have appealed to the consciences of heathens, as competent to decide in the controversy.  Christianity itself has thus practically confessed what is theoretically clear, that an authoritative external revelation of moral and spiritual truth is essentially impossible to man.  What God reveals to us, he reveals within, through the medium of our moral and spiritual senses.  External teaching may be a training of those senses, but affords no foundation for certitude.”