Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/172

Rh God's Gift. He made the laws of Minos, Moses, Numa, Rhadamanthus; he inspires the Poet, Artist, Patriot; works with the righteous everywhere. Had Fetichism no meaning? Was Polytheism only a lie with no truth at the bottom? Prayers, sacrifices, fasts, priesthoods, show that men believed in intercourse with God. Good simple-hearted men and women, who live lives of piety, believe it now, and never dream it is a great philosophical truth, which lies in their mind. They wonder anybody should doubt it.

But yet among thinking men, who have thought just enough to distrust instinct, but not enough to see by the understanding the object which instinct discloses, especially it seems among thinking Englishmen and Americans, a general doubt prevails on this point.

The material world is before our eyes; its phenomena are obvious to the senses, and most men having active senses—which develope before the understanding—and the lower faculties of intellect also somewhat active, get pretty clear notions about these phenomena, though not of their cause and philosophy. But as the soul is rarely so active as the senses, as the whole spiritual nature is not often so well developed as the sensual, so spiritual phenomena are little noticed; very few men have clear notions about them. Hence to many men all spiritual and religious matters are vague. “Perhaps yes and perhaps no,” is all they can say.

Then again the matter is made worse, for they hear extravagant claims made in relation to spiritual things and intercourse with God. One man says he was healed of a fever, or saved from drowning, not by the medicine, or the boatman, but by the direct interposition of God; another will have it that he has direct and miraculous illuminations, though it is plain he is still sitting in darkness. This bigot would destroy all human knowledge, that there may be clean paper to receive the divine word, miraculously written thereon; that fanatic bids men trust the doctrine which is reputed of miraculous origin and even at variance with human faculties. Both the bigot and the fanatic condemn Science as the “Pride of Reason,” and talk boastingly of their special revelations, their new light, the signs and wonders they have seen or heard of to attest