Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/9

x any time have been used for their support, we are persuaded they have hurt rather than helped them. But if the time ever come when this state of things can go on no longer, when there must be a defect either in the honesty or the intelligence of the adherents of the Churches, then a fatal change will pass over them. The tree whose root is dead, or whose stem is hollow, may continue to put forth leaves for a few years, but it must wither at last. The symptoms of such approaching decay in the Christian Churches will doubtless follow in natural sequence; and the refusal of the higher class of minds to adopt the ministry as a profession will be succeeded rapidly by the further and further depreciation of the mental status of the Church, and by a growing public sense of its hollowness and incapacity to meet the problems of the age. When this deteriorating process has reached a certain length, all the public and private interests involved in the Churches' conservation, all the vast vis inertia of such an institution, so long solidly established on English soil, and rooted alike in English prejudices and English sacred affections—all these securities, so often quoted as guaranteeing its immutable maintenance, must give way at last and fail. There is no durable foundation for a religion whatsoever, save the sincere belief of its adherents.

If these things be true of Traditional Christianity, then, as we have said, a solemn catastrophe is slowly, but surely, approaching. The great Ship which has been the Ark of humanity so long, and which even now unfurls its sails so proudly to the winds, that great and noble ship is, perhaps, in our own time settling slowly down and sinking under the waters of an unfathomable sea. A mournful and a terrible sight it would be, were we not assured that all the souls it bears are for ever safe, and that all its freight of precious truths will float up again with unerring safety, even from the forgotten depths of time.

The task of him who would most essentially benefit his race in a time like this, must be to prepare men to meet unharmed the inevitable future. He must supply them with a faith which will remain undisturbed when the great change arrives.

The perils of finding ourselves standing alone without a God to love or a law to obey, while the frail structure of the creed of our youth fell around us, like a tent on Lebanon, before the blast of the storm—these perils may be known to many of us, and happy are they who have survived them in full