Besides this, the misrepresentation of which I complained is not confined to the rather metaphysical words of within and without, as to which the most candid friends may differ, and may misunderstand one another;—­as to which also I may be truly open to correction;—­but he assumes the right to tell his readers that my doctrine undervalues Truth, and Intellect, and Traditional teaching, and External suggestion, and Historical influences, and counts the Bible an impertinence.  When he fancies he can elicit this and that, by his own logic, out of sentences and clauses torn from their context, he has no right to disguise what I have said to the contrary, and claim to justify his fraud by accusing me of self-contradiction.  Against all my protests, and all that I said to the very opposite previous to any controversy, he coolly alludes to it (p. 40 of the “Defence”) as though it were my avowed doctrine, that:  “Each man, looking exclusively within, can at once rise to the conception of God’s infinite perfections.”

IV.  When I agree with Paul or David (or think I do), I have a right to quote their words reverentially; but when I do so, Mr. Rogers deliberately justifies himself in ridiculing them, pretending that he only ridicules me.  He thus answers my indignant denunciation in the early part of his “Defence,” p. 5:—­

“Mr. Newman warns me with much solemnity against thinking that ‘questions pertaining to God are advanced by boisterous glee.’  I do not think that the ‘Eclipse’ is characterised by boisterous glee; and certainly I was not at all aware, that the things which alone[13] I have ridiculed—­some of them advanced by him, and some by others—­deserved to be treated with solemnity.  For example, that an authoritative external revelation,[14] which most persons have thought possible enough, is impossible,—­that man is most likely born for a dog’s life, and ’there an end’—­that there are great defects in the morality of the New Testament, and much imperfection in the character of its founder,—­that the miracles of Christ might be real, because Christ was a clairvoyant and mesmerist,—­that God was not a Person, but a Personality;—­I say, I was not aware that these things, and such as these, which alone I ridiculed, were questions ‘pertaining to God,’ in any other sense than the wildest hypotheses in some sense pertain to science, and the grossest heresies to religion.”

Now first, is his statement true?

Are these the only things which he ridiculed?

I quoted in my reply to him enough to show what was the class of “things pertaining to God” to which I referred.  He forces me to requote some of the passages.  “Eclipse,” p. 82 [1st ed.] “You shall be permitted to say (what I will not contradict), that though Mr. Newman may be inspired for aught I know ... inspired as much as (say) the inventor of Lucifer matches—­yet that his book is not divine,—­that it is purely human.”