Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/352

Rh and ever.” Do the joys of Paradise pall on the pleasure-jaded sense of the “Elect?” They look off in the distance to the tortures of the damned, where Destruction is naked before them, and Hell hath no covering; where the Devil with his angels stirreth up the embers of the fire which is never quenched; where the doubters, whom the Church could neither answer nor put to silence; where the great men of antiquity, Confucius, Budha, Hermes, Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; where the men, great, and gifted, and glorious, who mocked at difficulty, softened the mountains of despair, and hewed a path amid the trackless waste, that mortal feet might tread the way of peace; where the great men of modern times, who would not insult the Deity by bowing to the foolish word of a hireling priest—where all these writhe in their tortures, turn and turn and find no ray, but yell in fathomless despair; and when the Elect behold all this, they say, striking on their harps of gold, “Aha! We are comforted and Thou art tormented, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth, and our garments are washed white in the blood of the Lamb.”

This system exists nowhere in its perfection; that is, only ideal. It is incarnated imperfectly in many forms. But it is the groundwork of the Popular Theology of New England. It appears variously modified in all the chief denominations of North America and Great Britain. No one of all the sects which represents it but has great excellencies in spite of this hateful system. Each of them is doing a good but imperfect work. A rude nation must have a rude doctrine. Yet such is the system on which they rest their Theology. Though their Religion, say what they will, comes from no such quarter. This system is older than Protestantism, and is the child of many fathers. However it is continually approaching its end. The battering-ram which levelled the philosophy of the Stagirite and the schoolmen, will beat, ere long, on the Theology of the Church, and how shall it stand? It is based on a lie, and that lie undermined. A man who