Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/202

Rh our own eternal hell?" exclaimed the damnationists. "You have taken away our Lord, and we know not where you have laid Him ; there can be no religion if eternal torment do not scare depraved man out of his senses." Still this denial went on and multiplied, and a third great breach was made in the battled wall, while all the Ecclesiastical Institutions shook as hell was wrenched away from underneath that corner of the church.

These breaches cannot be filled up; the German Protestant goes not back to the "Infallible Roman church;" the Unitarian has consulted his "carnal reason," and no longer believes that the Eternal God once lay, newly born, a baby in the arms of his virgin mother, and was fed from her bosom; the Universalist returns no more to the "doctrine of devils," but refuses to worship a God who would damn even a New England stealer of men. Who can annul a fact? The charmed wall of Christian theology is cloven through in three places. Shall mankind build up the breach? It were as easy to reverse the motion of the great rivers of the continent, and make the Atlantic ascend the St Lawrence, climb up the steep of Niagara, and empty its vast volume into the lake of the woods.

But in the great body of the Christian church this old theology still prevails. The Catholics outnumber the Protestants as three to two, all the Celto-Romanic nations yet cleave to the Latin church, and are shut up in the clenched fist of the Pope. With the greater part of the Protestants hell and the Trinity are still treasured in their "creed." Even the Unitarians and Universalists cleave to "salvation by Christ," which means nothing in theology unless Christ be a God-man to save, and there be also "a dreadful fiery hell" of eternal duration, and wrath of God kept for ever, which we are to be saved from: they cleave to external authority, and will not credit the immortality of the soul, or the obligations of duty, unless they find it written in the Bible and confirmed by "miracles." So in theology they know no ultimate God but of paper, which they worship instead of the Infinite Cause and Providence of the universe, who confronts us ever, go we where we may. Accordingly they also accept the old "revelation" as the Ultima Thule of religion,