This passage deserved the enmity of my critic.  He quoted bits of it, very sparingly, never setting before his readers my continuous thought, but giving his own free versions and deductions.  His fullest quotation stood thus, given only in an after-chapter:—­“What God reveals to us, he reveals within, through the medium of our moral and spiritual senses.”  “Christianity itself has practically confessed what is theoretically clear, (you must take Mr. Newman’s word for both,)[7] that an authoritative external revelation of moral and spiritual truth is essentially impossible to man.”  “No book-revelation can, without sapping its own pedestal, &c. &c.”

These three sentences are what Mr. Rogers calls the three cracked bells, and thinks by raising a laugh, to hide his fraud I have carefully looked through the whole of his dialogue concerning Book Revelation in his 9th edition of the “Eclipse” (pp. 63-83 of close print).  He still excludes from it every part of my argument, only stating in the opening (p. 63) as my conclusions, that a book-revelation is impossible, and that God reveals himself from within, not from without In his Defence (which circulates far less than the “Eclipse,” to judge by the number of editions) he displays his bravery by at length printing my argument; but in the “Eclipse” he continues to suppress it, at least as far as I can discover by turning to the places where it ought to be found.

In p. 77 (9th ed.) of the “Eclipse.” he implies, without absolutely asserting, that I hold the Bible to be an impertinence.  He repeats this in p. 85 of the “Defence.”  Such is his mode.  I wrote:  “Without a priori belief, the Bible is an impertinence,” but I say, man has this a priori belief, on which account the Bible is not an impertinence.  My last sentence in the very passage before us, expressly asserts the value of (good) external teaching.  This my critic laboriously disguises.

He carefully avoids allowing his readers to see that I am contending fundamentally for that which the ablest Christian divines have conceded and maintained; that which the common sense of every missionary knows, and every one who is not profoundly ignorant of the Bible and of history ought to know.  Mr. Rogers is quite aware, that no apostle ever carried a Bible in his hand and said to the heathen, “Believe that there is a good and just God, because it is written in this book;” but they appealed to the hearts and consciences of the hearers as competent witnesses.  He does not even give his reader enough of my paragraph to make intelligible what I meant by saying “Christianity has practically confessed;” and yet insists that I am both unreasonable and uncharitable in my complaints of him.

I here reprint the summary of my belief concerning our knowledge of morality as fundamental, and not to be tampered with under pretence of religion.  “If an angel from heaven bade me to lie, and to steal, and to commit adultery, and to murder, and to scoff at good men, and usurp dominion over my equals, and do unto others everything that I wish not to have done to me; I ought to reply, BE THOU ANATHEMA!  This, I believe, was Paul’s doctrine; this is mine.”