Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/341

294 altars, forms, and usages that ministered to your mother's piety, helped her bear the bitter ills and cross of life, and gave her winged tranquillity in the hour of death; to sunder your ties of social sympathy; destroy the rites associated with the aspiring dream of childhood, and its earliest prayer, and the sunny days of youth—to disturb these because they weave chains, invisible but despotic, which bind the arm and fetter the foot, and confine the heart; to hew down the hoary tree under whose shadow the nations played their game of life, and found in death the clod of the valley sweet to their weary bosom,—to destroy all this because it poisons the air and stifles the breath of the world—it is a sad and a bitter thing; it makes the heart throb, and the face, that is hard as iron all over in public, weeps in private, weak woman's tears it may be. Such trials are not for vulgar souls; they feel not the riddle of the world. The vulgar Church—it will do for them, for it bakes bread, and brews beer. Would you more? No. That is enough for blind mouths. Duty, Freedom, Truth, a divine Life, what are they? Trifles no doubt to monk Tetzel, the Leos and the Bembos, and other sleek persons, new and old. But to a heart that swells with Religion, like the Atlantic pressed by the wings of the storm, they are the real things of God, for which all poor temporalities of fame, ease, and life are to be cast to the winds. It is needful that a man be true; not that he live. Are men dogs, that they must be happy ? Luther dared to be undone.

The sacramental error of Protestantism in restricting private judgment to the doctrines of the Bible, was in part neutralized by admitting freedom of individual conscience, and therefore the right and the duty to interpret the Bible. Here it allowed great latitude. Each man might determine by historical evidence his own canon of Scripture, in some measure, and devise his own method of interpretation. Yet the old spirit of the Church was still there, to watch over the exegesis. The Bible was found very elastic, and therefore hedges were soon set about it in the shape of symbolical books, creeds, thirty-nine articles, catechisms, and confessions of faith, which cooped up the soul in narrower limits. But these formularies, like the Scriptures,