Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 11 Critical Writings.djvu/305

Rh the Infinite God. The warrant of ultimate human welfare is indorsed on every person, on each living thing, in the handwriting of the Infinite God; and though I could not trust the promise of any of the popular finite deities, I am as sure of the Infinite God as I am that one and one make two, or that I myself exist. The instinctive desire of human nature is God's Promise to pay; Eternity His time.

Then look at the pain and misery which come from the intellectual Mistakes and moral Errors of mankind; leave out nothing, diminish nothing, look St Giles' in the face; study the sufferings of all the Irelands of the earth; confront all the wars of the world; meet eye to eye that most hideous of living monsters, American Slavery, the lifeblood of three million men dripping from the democratic hand;—examine the political, social, domestic, and religious wretchedness of mankind, does it amount to Absolute Evil? Is there any reason to think so? Surely not. Are present pain and misery excessive for their unavoidable and merciful function? Scrutinize with the nicest analysis of science, and you must confess that so far as the facts are known the benevolence of Providence perpetually appears; and so far as the analogy reaches the same conclusion follows.

Then comes the scientific idea of the Infinite God to fill up the chasms which science leaves unfilled. A church, a family, a community, a State, is each a machine formed of human materials, wherewith to achieve the religious, domestic, social, and political welfare of mankind: if the machine be a poor or ineffective tool, is it plainly wise and merciful, nay, just and loving, that pain should warn us of the insufficiency of the instrument; and repeat the warning till we have abandoned it and made a wiser experiment? As the centripetal and centrifugal forces in the solar system are just sufficient to keep each planet in its orbit, rhythmically wheeling about the sun, with no deficiency, and no redundance, so is the pain which follows human Error but just enough to warn us of the ruin and hold us back. The astronomical conclusion is mathematically demonstrable from the facts of observation and the intuitions of consciousness; the human conclusion is not yet inducible from facts of observation, but deducible