Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/72

60 canons of criticism which we apply to other departments of literature. Every theology, no matter how emphatic its assertion of a supernatural source, bears about it the plain marks of its human origin. The conceptions of God vary with the zones and closely parallel the grades of culture in which they arise. The commandments called divine become more elevated as the civilization of a people advances. The disciples of a prophet or apostle direct the noble impulses he has implanted in their hearts to broaden his teachings and correct his errors. Contrast the almost human tribal God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with the lofty idea of the Deity entertained by Isaiah. Compare this latter, again, with the universal Father whom Jesus taught his followers to worship. Mark the cumbrous legality and ritualism of the Old Testament and its silence respecting the future life; how different this from the teaching of Jesus, who exalted the spirit above the letter, valued love more than sacrifice, and assured his hearers of an immortality which made this world but a temporary scene of trial and probation! Note how the high-minded Paul saw nothing reprehensible in slavery, and compare that with the humanity of an age which gives even dumb animals rights against their owners. The evolution of thought in general is fully exemplified by thought in theology, notwithstanding its assertion of a sacred fixity. John Wesley, sensible man that he was, said that, if he were to give up his faith in witchcraft, he would give up the Bible. Yet his followers have dropped the witchcraft, and kept the Bible.

No study of human history would be valuable or just which did not recognize as a prime fact the profound religious instincts of our race. The awe inspired by the sublimity of the starry heavens, and the terrible and resistless forces of Nature—those of the volcano, the tempest, the pestilence so mysterious in its origin and spread, and the famines so devastating in the childhood of races—all these, not less than the kindly succession of the seasons, and the enjoyments of health and home, have suggested an infinite Power, the immanent sustaining spirit of universal life. The baffled hopes and aspirations of the soul, the anguish of bereaved affection, the enigmas and tragedies of life, have joined together to implant a faith in another life which shall be complement and compensation for this. As a record of man's perception of his helplessness in the combat with Nature, as a pathetic registration of his hope, fear, and remorse, the religious sentiment is entitled to our profound respect. Every sentiment, however, of the human heart, while compelling our respect or reverence in itself, awakens some less lofty feeling by its expression in institutions. The {SIC|Sanhedrims|Sanhedrins}} and Councils of the churches, which have arisen by virtue of the religious sentiments of our race, do not appear to have been lifted above the passions and partialities of our Congresses and Parliaments. The inner heart of humility and reverence in religion we highly respect, but the churches not so highly. The inevitable