Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/291

244 Conscience and Religion, co-working with them all. A third thing is not possible.

Which shall be done? The practical answer was given long ago; it has always been given, except in times of fanatical excitement. Because there is chaff and husks in the Bible, are we to eat of them, when there is bread enough and to spare? Pious men neglect what does not edify. Who reads gladly the curses of the Psalmist; chapters that make God a man of war, a jealous God, the butcher of the nations? Certainly but few; let them be exhorted to repentance. Men cannot gather grapes of thorns, grasp them never so lovingly; honest men will leave the thorns, or pluck them up. Now Criticism—which the thinking character of the age demands—asks men to do consciously and thoroughly what they have always done imperfectly and with no science but that of a pious heart; that is, to divide the word rightly; separate mythology from history, fact from fiction, what is religious and of God from what is earthly and not of God; to take the Bible for what it is worth. Fearful of the issue we may put off the question a few years; may insist as strongly as ever on what we know to be false; ask men to believe it, because in the records, and thus drive bad men to hypocrisy, good men to madness, and thinking men to “infidelity;” we may throw obstacles in the way of Religion and Morality, and tie the millstone of the Old and New Testaments about the neck of Piety as before. We may call men “Infidels and Atheists,” whom Reason and Religion compel to uplift their voice against the idolatry of the Church; or we may attempt to smooth over the matter, and say nothing about it, or not what we think. But it will not do. The day of Fire and Fagots is ended; the toothless “Guardian of the Faith” can only bark. The question will come, though alas for that man by whom it comes.

Other religions have their sacred books, their Korans, Vedas, Shasters, which must be received in spite of Reason, as masters of the soul. Some would put the Bible on the same ground. They glory in believing whatever is