He looked at it a moment, and then inquired: "H-h-how do you know it's A ?" The teacher replied that when she was a little girl she had been to school to an old gentleman, who told her so.
The boy eyed the A for a moment and then asked: "H-h-how do you know but he l-l-lied ?" The teacher could not get over this obstacle, and the poor boy was sent home as incorrigible.
Mr.Emerson, and the whole school of those who despise instruction, had better appoint this man their prophet of the inner light, and endow Martha's Vineyard as the Penikese of skepticism.
But the knowledge of letters is not half of their indebtedness to external revelation.

For they will not deny that a Fiji cannibal has just the same "insight," "spiritual faculty," "mighty and transcendent soul," "self-consciousness," or any other name by which they may dignify our common humanity, which they themselves possess.

How does it happen, then, that these writers are not assembled around the cannibal's oven, smearing their faces with the blood, and feasting themselves on the limbs of women and children?
The inner nature of the cannibal and of the Rationalist is the same--whence comes the difference of character and conduct?
And the inner light, too, is the same; for they assure us that "inspiration, like God's omnipresence, is coextensive with the race." Is it not, after all, mere external revelation, in the shape of education--aye, moral and religious teaching that makes the whole difference between the civilized American and his inspired Fiji brother?
These gentlemen not only acknowledge, but try to repay their obligations to external revelation.

As it is impossible for God to give the world a book revelation of moral and religious truth, they modestly propose to come to his assistance, it being quite possible for some men to do what is impossible for God.

Accordingly, we have a book revelation of moral and religious truth, from one, in his treatise on "The Soul," an "external revelation" from another, in his "Discourse Concerning Religion," a "Morrison's pill from the outside," from a third, in his "Past and Present," and "announcements" from a fourth, which assuredly the great mass of mankind never "found true within them," else his orations and publications had not been needed to convert them.