Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 11 Critical Writings.djvu/49

Rh are erected by each denomination, and the means provided for educating, up to the level of the nation, such talent as moves towards the pulpit. Each denomination takes great pains with the ecclesiastical training of the children. Competition has the same effect in the churches as the market.

The Americans have applied the first principles of the Cartesian method in philosophy to everything except what concerns Theology and Religion. There they have mainly consented to walk by the old traditions. But the difference between the old and the new, between the intellectual principles of the accomplished and philosophic lyceum-lecturer, and those of the theological preacher holding forth on the same theme, from the same desk, to the same audience, springs in the eyes of all. The contradiction between Theology and the other Sciences is seen and understood by a large class of intelligent men; it is felt, but not understood, by a much larger class, men of genuine piety who reproach themselves because they doubt the miracles of the Bible and fail to relish the eternal damnation of men, or because they take so little interest in the dull routine of what in the churches is called religion. With the wide spread of a very superficial intellectual culture, and with the immense intellectual activity brought out by the political institutions and the industrial movements of the country, a great amount of doubt on theological matters has also been developed. Sometimes it is public, oftener it is secret. But it is plain that the contradiction between the Theology of the churches and the Science, the Literature, the Philanthropy, and the Piety of the age, is very widely felt and pretty widely understood.

Clergymen endeavour to solve this contradiction in two ways. Men of one party attempt to put man down and bring him back to the old Theology. They deride new Piety; they rail at new Philanthropy; they decry Science; and at each new-comer in Theology who puts his yeasty wine into the old bottles of the Church, or, still worse, into others of a newer make and pattern, they call out "Infidel! Atheist! Away with him! " But they have no physical force at their command as in continental Europe. It is almost three hundred years since Calvin burnt Unitarian Servetus alive at the stake, where now a Unitarian college teaches the obnoxious opinion. Quakers and Baptists are never disturbed in Boston which