Page:The Dial- a monthly magazine for literature, philosophy and religion 1.djvu/14

10 Cathedral of Rheims, "Why can not the present age build such cathedrals as that?" "That structure," replied Heine, "was reared by an age of convictions; onrs is an age of opinions." There was a period when the Roman Catholic church represented that which was deepest, most immortal in the masses of men. The mitre was not then the crown of a despot; the crosier had not sharpened into the hayonet or coiled into the thumhscrew; and the loyal human heart, once won, will sufier long ere it recall a plighted faith. But the awful day came; a higher conviction arrived embodying that Spirit at whose touch the Right and the Wrong stand together at the bar of judgment; and from that day the Church which would not abandon the unveiled wrong could build no more great cathedrals! "Shall we not rather find," says Ruskin, "that Romanism, instead of being a promoter of the arts, has never shown itself capable of a single great conception since the separation of Protestantism from its side? So long as, corrupt though it might be, no clear witness had been borne against it, so that it still included in its ranks a vast number of faithful Christians, so long its arts were noble. But the witness was borne, the error made apparent, and Rome, refusing to hear the testimony, or forsake the falsehood, has been struck from that instant with an intellectual palsy, which has not only incapacitated her from any further use of the arts which were once her ministers, but has made her worship the shame of its own shrines, and her worshippers their destroyers."

In course of time. Protestantism, in the forms which it assumed, became in turn a tradition rather than a conviction; a thing borne with sufferance, not with joy. As a conviction, it culminated in the planting of New England; then its spirit began a slow ebb. Then rose up the prophets of a new faith and hope; and Channing, Freeman, Hollis, the Wares, the Buckminsters, easily gained the throne of American Thought. After them came a period of theological empyricism, confusing a specific and temporary movement with the eternal and progressive spirit on which the Unitarian movement was but another bead strung. Again was the witness borne, and the command forward beard. But the prophets were stoned, the Lord at his coming denied. With what result? He who looks for Boston Unitarianism will see a series of stranded churches—churches once alive, now disintegrated, sold at auction to other sects, hers and there a fusion of two or three in one to