Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/343

296 persecuted in one sense they flee into another. It is a very Proteus, and takes all forms at pleasure. Now it is a river placid as starlight, then a lion roaring for his prey. Job went through some troubles in his life, as the poem relates; but even death has not placed him where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. Professors and critics have handled him more sorely than Satan, his friends, or his wife. They have made him “sin with his lips;” his saddest disease he has caught at their hands; his greatest calamity was his exposition. “Oh that mine adversary had written a book," said the patient man. Did he wish to explain it? Then is he rightly treated, for the explainers have ploughed upon his back; they made long their furrows. Moses, says the Hebrew Scripture, was the most tormented of all the earth, but his trials in the wilderness were nothing to his sufferings on the rack of exegesis. The Critics and Truth have disputed over him as the Devil and Michael, but not without railing. The prophets had a hard time of it in their day and generation; but Jeremiah was put into his darkest dungeon by Christian scholars; Isaiah was never so painfully sawn asunder as by the interpreters, to whom facts are as no facts, and one day as a thousand years, in their chronology. Jonah and Daniel were never in such fatal jeopardy as at the present day. A choleric man in the Psalms could not curse his foes, but he uttered maledictions against “the enemies of the Church;” nor speak of recovering from illness, but “he predicts an event which took place a thousand years later.” A young Hebrew could not write an Anacreontic, but he spoke “of the Church and Christ.” Nay, Daniel, Paul, and John must predict the “abomination of Rome;” all the great events as they take place, and even the end of the world, in the day some fanatical interpreter happens to live. Is the Bible the Protestant standard of faith? Then it is more uncertain than the things to be measured. The cloud in Hamlet is not more variable than the “infallible rule” in the hands of the interpreters. The best things are capable of the worst abuse. Alas, when shall Science and Religion have their place with the sons of men?

Now since Protestantism denied the Immanence of God