the Author of "The Eclipse" has altered the order of his sentences to suit a purpose. He says, "The sentences quoted as 1, 2, 3 by him, with me have the order 3, 2, 1." I answer, as before, that Harrington was simply anxious to set forth at the head of his argument, in the clearest and briefest form, the conclusions he believed Mr. Newman to hold, and which he was going to confute. He had no idea of any relation of subordination or dependence in the above sophisms, as 1 have just proved them to be, whether arranged as 3, 2, 1, or 1, 2, 3, or 2, 3, 1, or in any other order in which the possible permutations of three things, taken three and three together, can exhibit them; ex nihilo, nihil fit and three nonentities can yield just as little. Jangle as many changes as you will on these three cracked bells, no logical harmony can ever issue out of them. But they may do very well, perhaps, for the tumble-down steeple and cracking walls of the church in which one of our spiritual reformers may dispense the new doctrine.

And now for Mr. Newman's four inferences from the whole, which he introduces with so much solemnity. 1. "That I feel so painfully the pressure of his reasoning, that I dare not bring it forward."

Answer. I was and am as unconscious of any pressure, as was the ox in the fable, of the fly who sat on his horn, and who politely hoped that he gave him no inconvenience. "I should not have known you were there," said the ox, "if you had not told me of your presence."

2. Mr. Newman says, that "since I have not impugned his arguments, but have suppressed them, and told my readers that he has given none, a sufficient reply on his part is to reprint them, and to warn people. that merriment may be founded on fiction."

Answer. That, since I have now certainly not suppressed his soi-disant "careful proof," but confuted it, a sufficient reply on my part is to remind people that there are other reasons for not noticing arguments besides their being incontrovertible.

3. Mr. Newman says, "it will be seen that he should need to write folios to expose tricks of this kind."

Answer. Very likely; if, as in the present case, he is to imagine the tricks before exposing them.

4. Mr. Newman says that it is in "the long paragraph just quoted, that, according to the discerning Author of The Eclipse of Faith,' he makes himself merry with the subject of a book-revelation.”

6

Answer. The "discerning Author" of "The Phases" is mistaken in supposing that he is represented as making himself merry with a book-revelation in that paragraph, nor does the Author of "The Eclipse" say that it is there that Mr. Newman does so. On the other hand, it would be easy to cite many passages in which Mr. Newman speaks most contemptuously of what he calls "Bibliolatry," and this would be called, in ordinary parlance, making merry with the subject.

*

Mr. Newman loudly denies, by the way, the truth of this charge brought against him in conjunction with Mr. Parker, and says that "I wish my readers to suppose him as flippant as myself." I really have no wishes on the subject, and willingly leave the reader to form any opinion on the point he thinks proper.* Perhaps, however, it would have been more accurate to say, that Mr. Newman, instead of making himself merry with the idea of a book-revelation, had made other people very merry by his arguments against its possibility.

* See "Soul," pp. 57, 240–248; Phases, pp. 117, 118, 132, 2d ed.; or the chapters entitled "The Religion of the Letter renounced,” and “Faith at Second-hand found to be Vain,” passim.

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AND SPIRITUALLY INSTRUCTIVE" WILL STAND.

It would appear, then, from all this, that Mr. Newman still maintains that an authoritative book-revelation is impossible to man; and as for his complaint, that I had omitted to notice the "arguments" by which he proved his assertion, I have now, I should hope, sufficiently shown their futility. But how, then, does he attempt to obviate the reasoning by which Harrington shows that, if it be impossible to God, it is at all events possible to man, since Mr. Newman has furnished that to Mr. Fellowes which it seems God himself could not have given to Mr. Newman?* "Surely," says Mr. Newman, "the author means merely that Mr. Fellowes found my book instructive. If so, with what sort of honesty can he pretend that I do not admit the Bible to be instructive?" Answer. I do not deny that he admits the Bible to be instructive, as he imme

* "The latter," says Mr. Newman, "is the cardinal fact adduced by the historical genius of our author, who here, as elsewhere, desires to found the spiritual upon the legendary, and abhors the basis of moral truth." (Reply, p. 23.) I answer, that "here, as elsewhere," Mr. Newman finds it necessary to misrepresent my sentiments. Read, instead of the above clauses, that "I do not deem man competent, and Mr. Newman singularly incompetent, to determine all necessary spiritual truth apart from the ‘historical,' not the legendary, revelation of God's Book, and that I distrust the ever-variable theories of truth which unaided reason has so plentifully supplied," and you will be near the mark.

diately proceeds to allow; but I admit that he is inconsistent in doing so, if his theory be true that "we know nothing of God from without, everything from within.” "But," he goes on to say, "if I ever so much despised the Bible, have I ever inculcated that all books, as such, are worthless, so as to be confuted by the bare fact of writing a book at all? "* Let us look at tne principle involved.

It appears that there is a convenient distinction to be made between what is morally and spiritually instructive, and what is morally and spiritually authoritative. I answer, in sound only; not in meaning. For to convince any one, who believes in a God and moral and spiritual truth at all, of any moral and spiritual truth,—no matter how the man who imparts it came by it, whether he got it direct from heaven, or it has percolated through a hundred minds before it reached his, — is ipso facto to make it authoritative in the sense that it is felt it ought to have authority; though whether it will have it, will depend marvellously upon whether it be believed to come certainly and immediately from God or not. He who knowś what he means when he talks of God and his claims,— man and his duty, — will smile at the paradox of any moral or spiritual truth being proved to him, - no matter how or by whom, while yet it is considered optional with him whether he shall regard it as merely instructive and not authoritative! The experimentum crucis, therefore, which Harrington proposes to Mr. Fellowes, remains just as it was. Fellowes acknowledges that he once thought, as did Mr. Newman, that various current doctrines of Christianity were true; but confesses, as does Mr. Newman, that he sees them

* Reply, p. 24.

to be wholly false, and (like that of a Mediator) morally "mischievous." If so, the new light must be authoritative with him. Well, then, if Mr. Newman can thus communicate truth, which is not only instructive, but, being "spiritual and moral," must in the nature of things be felt to be authoritative (whether obeyed or not), much more is it possible, one would imagine, for God to do the like, to do it infinitely better, and to do it with infinitely greater probability of its being, as well as being acknowledged to be, authoritative; as Christians believe he has done. But Mr. Newman says it is impossible that such a revelation can be given. Therefore the reasoning remains, that Mr. Newman has given that to Mr. Fellowes which it seems God himself could not give to Mr. Newman.

Take a simple example, and the whole fallacy appears in a moment. You find a Tahitian, or a NewZealander, quite as a matter of course, and thinking no harm in the world, ready, the one to bury his new-born child, or a dozen of them, and the other to bake and eat his enemy taken in war, or perhaps a worthy gentleman just shipwrecked on his coast; both the one and the other evincing, in all sorts of ways, that their "moral basis" is a very queer one. And so it goes on for ages: you convince them no matter how you got your truth, though I suspect that, if you got your truth in two ways, you will not get the requisite zeal to go and proclaim it but in one that all this is wrong; and you instruct them, but it is on subjects. which, being moral and spiritual, involves the "ought"; and every truth they admit necessarily becomes authoritative in the sense that it is felt it ought to have authority. It may be error that is so taught, when superstition teaches, and, as I believe, when Mr.

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