I conceived of two men, Nathaniel and Demas, encountering a pretender to miracles, a Simon Magus of the scriptures.  Nathaniel is guileless, sweet-hearted and of strong moral sense, but in worldly matters rather a simpleton.  Demas is a sharp man, who gets on well in the world, quick of eye and shrewd of wit, hard-headed and not to be imposed upon by his fellows; but destitute of any high religious aspirations or deep moral insight.  The juggleries of Simon are readily discerned by Demas, but thoroughly deceive poor Nathaniel:  what then is the latter to do?  To say that we are to receive true miracles and reject false ones, avails not, unless the mind is presumed to be capable of discriminating the one from the other.  The wonders of Simon are as divine as the wonders of Jesus to a man, who, like Nathaniel, can account for neither by natural causes.  If we enact the rule, that men are to “submit their understandings” to apparent prodigies, and that “revelation” is a thing of the outward senses, we alight on the unendurable absurdity, that Demas has faculties better fitted than those of Nathaniel for discriminating religious truth and error, and that Nathaniel, in obedience to eye and ear, which he knows to be very deceivable organs, is to abandon his moral perceptions.

Nor is the case altered, if instead of Simon in person, a huge thing called a Church is presented as a claimant of authority to Nathaniel.  Suppose him to be a poor Spaniard, surrounded by false miracles, false erudition, and all the apparatus of reigning and unopposed Romanism.  He cannot cope with the priests in cleverness,—­detect their juggleries,—­refute their historical falsehoods, disentangle their web of sophistry:  but if he is truehearted, he may say:  “You bid me not to keep faith with heretics:  you defend murder, exile, imprisonment, fines, on men who will not submit their consciences to your authority:  this I see to be wicked, though you ever so much pretend that God has taught it you.”  So, also, if he be accosted by learned clergymen, who undertake to prove that Jesus wrought stupendous miracles, or by learned Moolahs who allege the same of Mohammed or of Menu, he is quite unable to deal with them on the grounds of physiology, physics, or history.—­In short, nothing can be plainer, than that the moral and spiritual sense is the only religious faculty of the poor man; and that as Christianity in its origin was preached to the poor, so it was to the inward senses that its first preachers appealed, as the supreme arbiters in the whole religious question.  Is it not then absurd to say that in the act of conversion the convert is to trust his moral perception, and is ever afterwards to distrust it?