“I read recently in an English work,” she interrupted, “that truth makes revelation, and not revelation truth.  This perfectly expressed what I found in reading the ‘German Theology.’  I read the book, and I felt the power of its truths so overwhelmingly that I was compelled to submit to it.  The truth was revealed to me; or rather, I was revealed to myself, and I felt for the first time what belief meant.  The truth which had long slumbered in my soul belonged to me, but it was the word of the unknown teacher which filled me with light, illuminated my inner vision, and brought out my indistinct presentiments in fuller clearness before my soul.  When I had thus experienced for the first time how the human soul can believe, I read the Gospels as if they, too, had been written by an Unknown man, and banished the thought as well as I could that they were an inspiration from the Holy Ghost to the apostles, in some wonderful manner; that they had been endorsed by the councils and proclaimed by the church as the supreme authority of the alone-saving belief.  Then, for the first time, I understood what Christian faith and revelation were.”

“It is wonderful,” said I, “that the theologians have not broken down all religion, and they will succeed yet, if the believers do not seriously confront them and say:  ‘Thus far but no farther.’  Every church must have its servants, but there has been as yet no religion which the Priests, the Brahmins, the Schamins, the Bonzes, the Lamas, the Pharisees, or the Scribes have not corrupted and perverted.  They wrangle and dispute in a language unintelligible to nine-tenths of their congregations, and instead of permitting themselves to be inspired by the apostles, and of inspiring others with their inspiration, they construct long arguments to show that the Gospels must be true, because they were written by inspired men.  But this is only a makeshift for their own unbelief.  How can they know that these men were inspired in a wonderful manner, without ascribing to themselves a still more wonderful inspiration?  Therefore they extend the gift of inspiration to the fathers of the church; they attribute to them those very things which the majority have incorporated in the canons of the councils; and there again, when the question arises how we know that of fifty bishops twenty-six were inspired and twenty-four were not, they finally take the last desperate step, and say that infallibility and inspiration are inherent in the heads of the church down to the present day, through the laying on of hands, so that infallibility, majority and inspiration make all our convictions, all resignation, all devout intuitions, superfluous.  And yet, notwithstanding all these connecting links, the first question returns in all its simplicity:  How can B know that A is inspired, if B is not equally, or even more, inspired than A?  For it is of more consequence to know that A was inspired than for one’s self to be inspired.”