Such is his entire notice of the topic.  From any other writer I should indeed have been amazed at such treatment.  I had made the very inoffensive profession of agreeing with the current doctrine of Christians concerning spiritual influence.  As I was not starting any new theory, but accepting what is notorious, nothing more than an indication was needed.  I gave, what I should not call definition, but description of it.  My critic conceals that I have avowed agreement with Christians; refers to it as a theory of my own; complains that it is obscure; pretends to quote my definition, and leaves out all the cardinal words of it, which I have above printed in italics.  My defender, in the “Prospective Review,” exposes these mal-practices; points out that my opponent is omitting the main words, while complaining of deficiency; that I profess to agree with Christians in general; and that I evidently agree with my critic in particular.  The critic undertakes to reply to this, and the reader has before him the whole defence.  The man who, as it were, puts his hand on his heart to avow that he anxiously sets before his readers, if not what I mean, yet certainly what I have expressed,—­still persists in hiding from them the facts of the case; avoids to quote from the reviewer so much as to let out that I profess to agree[8] with what is prevalent among Christians and have no peculiar theory;—­still withholds the cardinal points of what he calls my definition; while he tries to lull his reader into inattention by affecting to be highly amused, and by bantering and bullying in his usual style, while perverting the plainest words in the world.

I have no religious press to take my part.  I am isolated, as my assailant justly remarks.  For a wonder, a stray review here and there has run to my aid, while there is a legion on the other side—­newspapers, magazines, and reviews.  Now if any orthodox man, any friend of my assailant, by some chance reads these pages, I beg him to compare my quotations, thus fully given, with the originals; and if he find anything false in them, then let him placard me as a LIAR in the whole of the religious press.  But if he finds that I am right, then let him learn in what sort of man he is trusting—­what sort of champion of truth this religious press has cheered on.

III.  I had complained that Mr. Rogers falsely represented me to make a fanatical “divorce” between the intellectual and the spiritual, from which he concluded that I ought to be indifferent as to the worship of Jehovah or of the image which fell down from Jupiter.  He has pretended that my religion, according to me, has received nothing by traditional and historical agencies; that it owes nothing to men who went before me; that I believe I have (in my single unassisted bosom) “a spiritual faculty so bright as to anticipate all essential[9] spiritual verities;” that had it not been for traditional religion, “we should everywhere have heard the invariable utterance of spiritual religion in the one dialect of the heart,”—­that “this divinely implanted faculty of spiritual discernment anticipates all external truth,” &c. &c.  I then adduced passages to show that his statement was emphatically and utterly contrary to fact.  In his “Defence,” he thus replies, p. 75:—­