Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/203

Rh its uses. It must, be such a truth as they can use for their purposes; canonized truth; truth long known; that alone is acceptable, and called "religious truth;" all else is "profane and carnal," as the reason which discovers it. They represent the average intelligence of society; hence, while keeping the old, they welcome not the now. They promote only popular forms of truth, popular in all Christendom, or m their special sect. They lead in no intellectual reforms; they hinder the loaders. Negatively and positively, they teach, that to believe what is clerically told you in the name of religion, is bettor than free, impartial search after the truth. They dishonour free thinking, and venerate constrained believing. When the clergy doubt, they seldom give men audience of their doubt. Few scientific men, not clerical, believe the Bible account of creation,—the universe made in six days, and but a few thousand years ago,—or that of the formation of woman, and of the deluge. Some clerical men still believe these venerable traditions, spite of the science of the times; but the clerical men who have no faith in these stories not only leave the people to think them true and miraculously taught, but encourage men in the belief, and calumniate the men of science who look the universe fairly in the face, and report the facts as they find them.

The church represents only the popular morality, not any high and aboriginal virtue. It represents not the conscience of human nature, reflecting the universal and unchangeable moral laws of God, touched and beautified by His love, but only the conscience of human history, reflecting the circumstances man has passed by, and the institutions he has built along the stream of time. So, while it denounces unpopular sins, vices below the average vice of society, it denounces also unpopular excellence, which is above the average virtue of society. It blocks the wheels rearward, and the car of humanity does not roll down hill; but it blocks them forward also. No great moral movement of the age is at all dependent directly on the church for its birth; very little for its development. It is in spite of the church that reforms go forward; it holds the curb to check more than the rein to guide. In morals, as in science, the church is on the anti-liberal side, afraid of progress, against movement, loving "yet a little