Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/80

say: This impulse is not of to-day nor of yesterday, and no man can tell whence it came, therefore it is the voice of infallible conscience. For, fine as that saying is, when applied to a genuine eternal truth, the test is not a sufficient one for us in our weakness to apply to the impulses that we find in our poor selves. For we soon forget whence came our prejudices and even our bad habits, and we can fancy that to be of immemorial antiquity which has begun to be in our own parish, and within the memory of the old men. A child born in one of our far western settlements grows up amid a community that is a few years older than himself, and not as old as his eldest brother. Yet he shall look upon all these rickety, wooden houses, and half-graded streets, full of rubbish, as the outcome of an immense past; he shall hear of the settlement of the town as he hears of ancient history, and he shall reverence the oldest deserted, weather-beaten, rotting log-cabin of the place, with its mud chimney crumbling to dust, quite as much as a modern Athenian child may reverence the ruins of the Parthenon. A time when all these things were not, shall be beyond his conception. Even so, if moral truth be eternal, we yet dare not undertake to judge what it is by merely examining ourselves to see what customs or tastes or moral judgments feel to our present selves as if they must have been eternal. Such absolute validity one might possibly feel as belonging to his mother’s way of making plum-pudding. Snow, to use a comparison of Aristotle’s, is as white after one day as if it had been lying untouched and unmelted for a thousand