The Eclipse of Faith | Page 6

such has been and will be the recoil from the
movement towards Rome. It is only one, however, of the causes of that
widely diffused infidelity which is perhaps the most remarkable
phenomenon of our day. Other and more potent causes are to be sought
in the philosophic tendencies of the age, and especially a sympathy, in
very many minds, with the worst features of Continental speculation.
"Infidelity!" you will say. "Do you mean such infidelity as that of
Collins and Bolingbroke, Chubb and Tindal?" Why, we have plenty of
those sorts too, and--worse; but the most charming infidelity of the day,
a bastard deism in fact, often assumes a different form,--a form, you
will be surprised to hear it, which embodies (as many say) the essence
of genuine Christianity! Yes; be it known to you, that when you have
ceased to believe all that is specially characteristic of the New
Testament,--its history, its miracles, its peculiar doctrine--you may still
be a genuine Christian. Christianity is sublimed into an exquisite thing
called modern "spiritualism." The amount and quality of "faith" are,
indeed, pleasingly diversified when come to examine individual
professors thereof; but it always based upon the principle that man is a
light to himself; that his oracle is within; so clear either to supersede
the necessity--some say even possibility--of all external revelation in
any sense of that term; or, when such revelation is in some sense
allowed, to constitute man the absolute arbiter how much or how little
of it is worthy to be received.
This theory we all perceive, of course, cannot fail to recommend itself
by the well-known uniformity and distinctness of man's religious
notions and the reasonableness of his religious practices! We all know
there has never been any want of a revelation;--of which have doubtless
had full proof among the idolatrous barbarians you foolishly went to
enlighten and reclaim. I wish, however, you had known it fifteen years

ago; I might have had my brother with me still. It is a pity that this
internal revelation--the "absolute religion," hidden, as Mr. Theodore
Parker felicitously phrases it, in all religions of all ages and nations, so
strikingly avouched by the entire history of world--should render itself
suspicions by little discrepancies in its own utterances among those
who believe in it. Yet so it is. Compared with the rest of the world, few
at the best can be got to believe in the sufficiency of the internal light
and the superfluity all external revelation; and yet hardly two of the
flock agree. It is the rarest little oracle! Apollo himself might envy its
adroitness in the utterance ambiguities. One man says that the doctrine
of "future life" is undoubtedly a dictate of the "religious
sentiment,"--one of the few universal characteristics of all religion;
another declares his "insight" tells him nothing of the matter; one
affirms that the supposed chief "intuitions" of the "religious
faculty"--belief in the efficacy of prayer, the free will of man, and the
immortality of the soul--are at hopeless variance with intellect and
logic; others exclaim, and surely not without reason, that this casts
upon our faculties the opprobrium of irretrievable contradictions! As
for those "spiritualists"--and they are, perhaps, at present the greater
part--who profess, in some sense, to pay homage to the New Testament,
they are at infinite variance as to how much--whether 7 1/2, 30, or 50
per cent of its records--is to be received. Very few get so far as the last.
One man is resolved to be a Christian,--none more so,--only he will
reject all the peculiar doctrines and all the supernatural narratives of the
New Testament; another declares that miracles are impossible and
"incredible, per se"; a third thinks they are neither the one nor the other,
though it is true that probably a comparatively small portion of those
narrated in the "book" are established by such evidence as to be worthy
of credit. Pray use your pleasure in the selection; and the more freely,
as a fourth is of opinion that, however true, they are really of little
consequence. While many extol in vague terms of admiration the deep
"spiritual insight" of the founders of Christianity, they do not trouble
themselves to explain how it is that this exquisite illumination left them
to concoct that huge mass of legendary follies and mystical doctrines
which constitute, according to the modern "spiritualism," the bulk of
the records of the New Testament, and by which its authors have
managed to mislead the world; nor how we are to avoid regarding them

either as superstitious and fanatical fools or artful and designing knaves,
if nine tenths, or seven tenths, of what they record is all to be rejected;
nor, if it be affirmed that they never did record it, but that somebody
else has