Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/10

Rh spiritual and moral life. Happy are they who slowly and painfully have built up stone by stone for themselves from the foundation a shelter for their souls; who have begun perchance with naught, save the resolution

and then have found that in the hard struggles of the higher self after victory over temptation, they have become conscious that there was present at the fight—One who could aid them with Almighty help, “strengthening them with might by His Spirit in the inner man”—One who when the battle was done would take His soldier to an eternal home. Happy are they who have learned such things; but they know best through what dangers they have passed, and to which they were consigned by the teachers who bade them hold by a creed full of contradictions and difficulties, or else abandon all hope that God would hear their prayers. To them, above all, it will seem terrible that the masses of men, the uneducated, the over-tried sons of toil, should have to pass through such perils; not one by one as now, but, as it may soon be, by thousands and millions, enhancing all each others' difficulties, and liable to the most fearful aberrations. In view of such a cataclysm, many would fain, with cowardly hearts, strive to put off the evil day and keep away from men's minds all such questions. But it is not in their hands to do so. The tide cannot be stopped by any Canute's decree. It is the great divinely-ordered progress of thought which has brought us to this pass, and we may take courage from the knowledge that He who caused it will guide us through. We must not, dare not, doubt that it will be to a larger, higher, purer truth the human race is being led onward; and that that truth is safer even than all the well-tried errors of the past. The old Ragnarok, the “Twilight of the Gods,” in which our heathen forefathers believed, may be coming now; but there will be a glorious sunrise afterwards. The true “Ages of Faith” are not behind us, but before.

The task, then, as we have said, of the religious teacher of our time, is to prepare and strengthen men for the future; to give them such faith in God and reverence for His law, independently of traditional creeds, as shall avail when these creeds are overwhelmed. He must enable every man to say with the brave Bishop of Natal, “I should tremble at the results of my