It seems "his hearers can't tell you on Sunday beforehand, if in that day's discourse they'll be Bibled or Koraned." The religious sentiment of Fetichism is not overlooked or underrated. The Kalmuck Tartar's proprietorship in the Absolute Religion is fervently recognised. And indeed everything is proved to be very Christian but common Christianity, and all religions are welcomed in apparent preference[1] to the religion of the New Testament. Not that the preference can for a moment be thought more than apparent; but to such appearances does a pique against orthodoxy irritate the preacher—his cue being to depreciate the claims of Christianity as much as possible, in order to rase the boundary-wall between it and circumjacent "paganism." All the discrimination allowable between Christendom and Heathendom is, au fond, a distinction without a difference: a distinction in degree, not a difference in kind. The diversity is specific, not generic; phenomenal, not noumenal. So far as Christianity is religion, or involves the religious sentiment, it would seem that the very Thugs and Anthropophagi are "best good Christians" although they know it not, and although a suspicion of that cheering fact never dawned on the mind of the unhappy people they kill and eat.
It is common to hear the uninitiated "general" (whose ignorance of sceptical literature is bliss), when adventuring an opinion on Mr. Theodore Parker at all, assert the identity of his theological status with that of Strauss. They are enviably unversed in the infinite discrepancies that obtain in the schools of the anti-supernaturalists—and have yet to learn that naturalists can be at daggers'-drawn inter se, or that there are any noticeable differences between the views of (say) Semler, with his theory of "accommodation," and Paulus, with his unflinching "naturalism," and Strauss, with his universal solvent, the Myth. Now, though Mr. Parker is in the advanced guard of neology, and indeed uses a far more trenchant and sweeping mode of hostility to "revealed religion" than do your sturdiest hyper-borean Germans, still, to suppose him a second-hand Strauss, inoculated throughout with the mythopoaic mania, it to misconceive his particular stand-point. On the contrary, he has signalised himself by applying to Strauss's method the reductio ad absurdum process, in a way so ingenious and amusing as to warrant present mention. Affirming that, by the Straussian System, any given historical event may be dissolved in a mythical solution, and the "seminal ideas" precipitated in their primitive form—and that any historical characters may thus be changed into an impersonal symbol of "universal humanity"—he proceeds to show, for example, now the whole history of the United States might be pronounced, by future myth detectors, a tissue of mythical stories, borrowed in part from the Old Testament, in part from the Apocalypse, and in part from fancy.
- ↑ Such is a common impression on the popular mind, after a perusal of Mr. Parker's homiletics. He seems, it is alleged, to have a spite against Christianity, and against it alone. But it may be answered, that this semblance of antipathy is in reality a necessary resultant from his scope; and that equally he would, if writing as a heterodox Mussulman, seem to hate Islamism with intensest emphasis; or if indoctrinating the Brahmins with Absolute Religion, he would seem to be less tolerant of Brahminism than of any rival system. It is with what lies nearest to him that his polemics are concerned. Valeat quantum.
