I'd like to be born the son of a duke with 90,000 pounds a year, on an enormous estate.... And I'd like to have the most enormous library, and I'd li… - Richard Francis Burton

The "Schedule of Doctrines" of the most liberal Christian Church insists upon human depravity, and the "absolute need of the Holy Spirit's agency in man's regeneration and sanctification." But what have we here? The "original calamity" was either caused by God or arose without leave of God, in either case degrading God to man. It is the old dilemma whose horns are the irreconcilable attributes of goodness and omniscience in the supposed Creator of sin and suffering. If the one quality be predicable, the other cannot be predicable of the same subject. Far better and wiser is the essayist's poetical explanation now apparently despised because it was the fashionable doctrine of the sage bard's day:—

Yes Truth may be, but 'tis not Here; mankind must seek and find it There,
But Where nor I nor you can tell, nor aught earth-mother ever bare. Enough to think that Truth can be: come sit we where the roses glow,
Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to 'unknow.'

All faith is False, all Faith is true:
Truth is the shattered mirror strown
In myriad bits; while each believes
his little bit the whole to own.