Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/6

Rh to come directly from the Great Author of Nature; and instead of external authentications and internal verifications of its various parts, every critical explorer brings us back new specimens of anachronisms, contradictions, and difficulties without number, till the authorship and date of all the more important histories are involved in hopeless obscurity. Everywhere and on all sides the results of inquiry are the same, or if now and then the besieged regain with much shouting some vantage ground too lightly claimed by the enemy, they are soon driven back from whole lines of trenches in another direction. Though books appear every month to assure us that “Scripture and science” are “not at variance,” and that the “Testimony of the Rocks” is in favour of the Mosaic Cosmogony; yet the urgency with which the asseveration is reiterated and the wildness of the hypotheses to which their authors have recourse to reconcile what ought to require no reconciliation, leave us an impression the direct contrary to that which they intend. Why are there, we ask, no volumes pouring from the press, corresponding to the rapid stream of advancing knowledge, and calling on us to observe “triumphant verifications of Scripture from the recent discoveries” in this, that, or the other science? It is certainly not for lack of will that no such books are written, or written only to bring corroboration to histories no more doubted than that of Thucydides.

The truth is, after all, simple enough. Those grand and noble books which make up the Bible and constitute the “Great Sheaf” in the whole harvest of human thought, even those books cannot be weighed in the balance, or measured by the standard of God's omniscience. Call them human and fallible, and they seem almost divine. But call them divine and infallible, and seek to find in them that knowledge of nature which, when they were written, only Nature's God possessed, and we do them wrong and despite, and obscure all their rightful claims to admiration. Nay, to try them as even historically accurate, according to our philosophy of history, is an injustice and anachronism. It is an anachronism to expect that men, who in the very extreme of their piety and reverence attributed every remarkable occurrence, every thunder-storm, or victory, or cure of disease, or wise legislation, or composition of noble poetry, to direct Divine interposition—men to whom secondary causes were nothing and first causes everything, should, in the capacity of historians, supply us with statements of facts unrefracted by