Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/132

Rh more or less, though the understanding be not cultivated, and the moral elements sleep in Egyptian night; in connection therefore with Wisdom or Folly, with Hope or Fear, with Love or Hate. Now in all periods of human history Religion demands something of her votaries. The ruder their condition, the more capricious and unreasonable is the demand. Though the Religious instinct itself be ever the same, the form of its expression varies with man's intellectual and moral state. Its influence on life may be considered under its three different manifestations.

Combining with Ignorance and Fear, the Religious Element leads to Superstition. This is the vilification and debasement of men. It may be defined as. Plutarch, though himself religious, pronounced it worse than Atheism. But the latter cannot exist to the same extent; is never an active principle. Superstition is a morbid state of human nature, where the conditions of religious development are not fulfilled; where the functions of the religious faculty are impeded and counteracted. But it must act, as the heart beats in the frenzy of a fever. It has been said with truth, “Perfect love casts out fear.” The converse is quite as true. Perfect fear casts out Love. The superstitious man begins by fearing God, not loving him. He goes on, like a timid boy in the darkness, by projecting his own conceptions out of himself; conjuring up a phantom he calls his God; a Deity capricious, cruel, revengeful, lying in wait for the unwary; a God ugly, morose, and only to be feared. He ends by paying a service meet for such a God, the service of Horror and Fear. Each man's conception of God is his conception of a man carried out to infinity; the pure idea is eclipsed by a human personality. This conception therefore varies as the men who form it vary. It is the index of their Soul. The superstitious man projects out of himself a creation begotten of his Folly and his Fear; calls the furious phantom God, Moloch, Jehovah; then attempts to please the capricious Being he has conjured up. To do this, the demands his Superstition makes are not to keep the laws which the one God wrote on the walls of Man's being; but to do arbitrary