Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/7

viii the coloured media of their imaginations; and detail for our cautious scepticism evidences which they never dreamed of requiring for their own simple-minded and ever ready belief. And passing beyond the Bible to the creeds of the churches, we find it equally impracticable to fit the thoughts of one age into the faith of another. The theological scheme which men composed when they believed the earth to be a plane, the centre of the universe, finds no place for itself in our modern cosmology, and the tremendous drama supposed to have been acted on that mighty stage, before the appalled and gazing Hosts of Heaven, becomes inconceivable played upon our little planet, one of the smallest of the many worlds revolving round one of the millions of suns of the unknown myriads of starry clusters. Modern Astronomy has not so much contradicted isolated statements in the Hebrew Scriptures as left the whole Nicene Theology without standing-room.

In every direction it would seem as if the battle of Traditionalism were lost, nor will the one great compromise offered by its noblest defenders suffice to save it. It will not be enough to abandon the infallibility of sacred books, and claim only Divine Inspiration and perfection for the moral and spiritual part of Christianity. Divinely true, divinely perfect as is much of that moral and spiritual part; there also the human and the fallible are to be found, and weightier than the blows which are struck at either the philosophy or the science of the Bible are those directed against doctrines offensive to the conscience and paralyzing to the heart. Nor are these morally objectionable doctrines only matters of unimportance and detail, such as Old Testament stories and precepts of earlier ages, corrected afterwards by a purer teaching. The deepest denial of all rises from the heart of humanity against fundamental dogmas, whose elimination from Christianity would almost identify it with Theism—the dogmas of the Fall, the Atonement, a Personal Devil, and an Eternal Hell.

So wide and vast is this upheaving wave of thought of which we have spoken, that other traditional creeds beside Christianity seem simultaneously threatened by its advance. Mahometanism is visibly running out the last sands of its existence; Judaism itself is undergoing a change; and the vast faith of India, whose origin is lost in the night of time, will probably before another century is over have fallen to rise no more. Not from external causes are these and the other religions of the East