My last sentence in the very passage before us, expressly asserts the value of (good) external teaching.

This my critic laboriously disguises.
He carefully avoids allowing his readers to see that I am contending fundamentally for that which the ablest Christian divines have conceded and maintained; that which the common sense of every missionary knows, and every one who is not profoundly ignorant of the Bible and of history ought to know.

Mr.Rogers is quite aware, that no apostle ever carried a Bible in his hand and said to the heathen, "Believe that there is a good and just God, _because_ it is written in this book;" but they appealed to the hearts and consciences of the hearers as competent witnesses.

He does not even give his reader enough of my paragraph to make intelligible what I _meant_ by saying "Christianity has practically confessed;" and yet insists that I am both unreasonable and uncharitable in my complaints of him.
I here reprint the summary of my belief concerning our knowledge of morality as fundamental, and not to be tampered with under pretence of religion.

"If an angel from heaven bade me to lie, and to steal, and to commit adultery, and to murder, and to scoff at good men, and usurp dominion over my equals, and do unto others everything that I wish _not_ to have done to me; I ought to reply, BE THOU ANATHEMA! This, I believe, was Paul's doctrine; this is mine." It may be worth while to add how in the "Defence" Mr.Rogers pounces on my phrase "_a priori_ view of the Divine character," as an excuse for burying his readers in metaphysics, in which he thinks he has a natural right to dogmatize against and over me.