who for its maintenance would deprive us of that reliance on conscience and the religious sentiment whereon alone the ultimate ground of any faith, even of their own, is to be found.
While contemplating, however, the noble task which might belong to such a teacher as we have supposed, we are arrested by a singular difficulty which it is clear would meet him from the side of those who ought naturally to be his allies. The wide-spread upheaving of thought of which we have spoken has brought out, along with its great and deep benefits, a phase of feeling which may now be traced pervading the higher order of minds of all nominal sections of opinion, orthodox no less than heterodox. Beside the counter-revolution of those who hold tenaciously by the past in proportion as they perceive it to be slipping away from them; beside the far more deplorable error of those who in every religious reformation of the world make an advancing creed the pretext for a retrograde morality; beside all these, there exists a class of minds who have impatiently carried beyond the limits of reason the tendencies of the age, who have abandoned, not only a definite faith, but the hopes of finding any definite faith whatever. Very great and very true is the impression which has been felt in our day of the mystery which surrounds human life on all sides, of the fallibility of all human knowledge, and of the ineffable, impenetrable Majesty of that awful Being whose nature our forefathers presumed to parcel out and analyze as a chemist might do the water or the air. We no longer look on the different creeds of the world, as the martyrs did of old, as being absolutely true or absolutely false, the service of God himself or of the Devil himself. We perceive them to be only steps upward in an infinite ascent, only the substitution for a lower of a higher but still all imperfect ideal of the Holy One. Doubtless we are nearer to the true judgment now. Doubtless also it was well that of old, in the days of the stake and the rack, men should have seen these things differently, for few indeed could have borne to die clearly discerning their persecutors to be only partially mistaken in their own creed; the creed for which they were enduring torture and agony,—only one of the thousand “little systems” of earth
“Which have their day, and cease to be,”
a “broken light” from the inaccessible Sun of Truth. If a
