Blessed deliverance to the world! But then, alas! this great deliverance is accompanied with several little inconveniences.

All poetry, three-fourths of the world's history, and the largest part of its philosophy, is couched in symbolical language, and especially the whole of the science of metaphysics, from which these very learned writers have deduced such edifying conclusions, is, from the beginning to the end, nothing but a symbolical application of the terms which describe material objects, to the phenomena of mind.
Alas! we must forever relinquish "the absolute," and "the infinite," and "the conditioned," with all their "affinities and potencies," up to "higher unity," and "the rhythm of universal existence," and all the rest of those perspicuous German hieroglyphics, whether entombed in their native pyramids for the amazement of succeeding generations, by Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel, or "worshiping in the great cathedral of the immensities," "with their heads uplifted into infinite space," or "lying on the plane of their own consciousness," in the writings of Carlyle, Emerson, and Parker.

They are myths, the whole of them, for they "are couched in symbolical language;" and Bauer, De Wette, and Strauss have pronounced every thing couched in symbolical language to be mythical.

Let us henceforth deliver our minds from all anxiety about history, philosophy, or religion, and stick to the price current and the multiplication table, the only accounts that are not "couched in symbolical language." Such is the sort of trash that passes for profound philosophy when once it is made unintelligible, and such are the canons of interpretation with which men calling themselves philosophers and Christians sit down to investigate the claims of the Bible as a revelation from God.

If they would speak out their true sentiments, they would say, "There can not be any revelation from God, because there is no God." But they could not call themselves professors of Christian colleges, and pastors of Christian churches, and reap the emoluments of such situations, if they would honestly avow their Atheism.