Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/13

xiv few sublime Socratic souls might have been found contented thus to bear all things sooner than renounce that one ray of purer light which had been granted to them, yet never could ordinary men and timid women, the rank and file of the army of martyrs, have fought the good fight under such banners. It was needful for them to discern in outward objective dogmas a distinction of good and evil, which in truth existed subjectively in the fidelity or unfaithfulness of their own souls to such light as they possessed. For them our modern breadth of thought would have seemed culpable latitudinarianism, and our habit of pouring the new wine of our own ideas into the old bottles of sacred formulæ a mockery and a snare. Ignatius and Polycarp, Latimer and Hooper, would have bitterly despised the alchemy which can “distil Astral Spirits out of dead churches,” and find something in Paganism and something in Popery transmutable at will into Christianity and Protestantism. But we in our day have reached a different pass. We seem to have quitted the region of light and darkness, truth and falsehood, and to have come to a land

There is among the highest order of minds a disposition to accept finally a condition which may be designated as one of reverential scepticism. They doubt not only whether any true religious creed has yet been found, but whether a mind penetrated with due modesty should seek to find one. While the age vaunts itself of being peculiarly one of religious earnestness, it has thus come to pass that it is peculiarly one of religious despair. We have ceased to think that a great intellect can possess a great faith.

A sort of direful fashion has set in to praise whatever seems vaguest in doctrine and weakest in faith, as if therefore it were necessarily wisest and most philosophic. We look distrustfully on any one who has not dissolved away in some mental crucible all solid belief in a Personal God, and a conscious immortality into certain fluid and gaseous ideas of Eternities and Immensities. We assume it contentedly as proven that the “limitations of religious thought” make it as hopeless for us to find a faith which will keep alive our souls as an elixir vitæ to keep alive our bodies. We wander to and fro hopelessly through the wilderness of doubt, and if any come to tell us of a land flowing with milk and honey, the glory of all lands,