Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/5

vi Religion, the religion which rests primarily on external evidence of certain supernatural events, stands front to front with the advancing waters, and needs must bear the whole force of their incalculable weight. Already the venerable fane in which our fathers worshipped so long, seems menaced with destruction, while one after another its bulwarks and corner-stones are sapped and submerged, and the sands on which it is built are shifting on every side. In the judgment of many its doom seems inevitable, unless not merely some partial lull and subsidence of the waves takes place, but the whole tide of human thought for ages turns back and sets in an opposite direction.

These solemn forebodings are not unnaturally scorned by those whose trust in the old creed has remained hitherto undisturbed. Every man's peculiar Church must needs be to his mind “founded on a rock,” and impregnable to “the gates of hell.” But to others equally naturally the creed they have themselves found untenable seems sure to prove in the end untenable to all who bring to its examination equal freedom and earnestness, and they note how as years go on every advance in philosophy and every discovery in science seems to bear in one and the same direction. Looking back over a few decades, the change in the state of all controversies on religion becomes remarkable, and the wild raids of professed “infidels” and timid attacks of latitudinarians in past times were found to be superseded by an orderly and resolute invasion, all the more formidable that the hostile bands approach from the most opposite quarters. It seems to be but a question of time, when the leaguer will be complete, and after outposts and trenches have fallen one by one into the hands of the enemy, the old towers themselves will fall, undermined by a deeper philosophy than their builders knew, and shattered by shot and shell from every cohort in the camp of knowledge. Underground, there works the ever-progressing conviction that a supernatural revelation, miracles, prophecies, infallible books, and infallible churches, are things in themselves nearly, if not utterly, incredible. And overhead there hurtle in the air (so fast that we can scarce note them as they pass) the missiles from every battalion of science, striking deadly blows wherever they can be brought to bear on the defences of the supposed revelation. The astronomy, the geology, the chronology, and ethnology of our time have at least seemed always to contradict, and never to corroborate, the Book which is yet claimed