Litchfield enquirer., 1867-05-23
tuned; when wonders were credible in

| proportion to their magnitude; and theo- logians, with easy command of belief, ad- ded miracle to miracle, and piled dogma upon dogma. Then the tide changed; Q fresh era opened, which in the eyes of those who considered the old system the only right one, was the letting loose of the i'm personated spirit of evil; when profane eyes were looking their idol in the face; when men were saying to the miraculous images, You are but stone and wood; and to the piece of bread, You are but dust as l am dust and then the huge medieval fabric crumbled down in ruin
 "All forms of thought, all objects of de- votion, are made thus liable to perpetual revision, if only that belief shall not petri- fly into habit, but remain the reasonable conviction of a reasonable soul The change of times and the change of condi- tions change also the appearance of things which in themselves are the same which they always were. Facts supposed once to be as fixed as the stars melt into fiction. A closer acquaintance with the phenomena [ of experience has revealed to us the action of forces before undreamt of, working throughout nature with unerring uniform ity; and to the medieval stories of magic, witchcraft, or the miracles of saints, we are l evidence on which stories were received may remain unimpaired, but it no longer produces the same conviction. Even in ordinary human things where the evidence is lost-as ill some of our own state trials, and where we know only that it was such as brought conviction to judges, juries and rliaments-historians do not hesitate to call their verdicts into question, thinking 1t more likely that whole masses of men should have been led away by passion or fraud or cowardice than that this or that particular crime should have been commit 1 ted. That we often go beyond our office and exaggerate the value of our new crite- ria of truth may be possible enough; but it is no less certain that this is the tenden- cy of modern thought. Our own age, like every age which has gone before it, judges the value of testimony, not by itself mere ly, but by the degree to which it cores ponds with our own sense of the laws of probability; and we consider events prob able or improbable by the habit of mind which is the result of our general knowl- edge and culture. To the Catholic of the middle ages miracle was more likely than not; and when he was told that miracle had been worked, he believed 1t as he would have believed had he been told that 8 shower of rain had fallen, or that the night frost had killed the buds upon his fruit trees If his cattle died, he found the cause in the malice of Satan or the evil eye of witch; and if two or more wit nesses could have been found to swear that they had heard an old woman curse him, she would have been burnt for sorceress. The man of science, on the other hand, knows nothing of witches and sorcerers; | u-ha ho find rot1 l,o es to entertain the possibility of the inter- vention of cause beyond nature; and thus that very element of marvel which to the more superstitious temperament was an evidence of truth, becomes to the better informed a cause of suspicion.
 i "So jt has been that throughout history, as between individuals among ourselves, we trace two habits of thought, one of which has given us churches, creeds, and the knowledge of God; the other has given us freedom and science, has pruned the luxuriance of imaginative reverence, and reminds piety of what it is too ready to forget-that God is truth Yet essential as they are to one another, each keeps too ab- solutely to the circle of its own convic- tions, and, but half able to recognise the merit of principles which are alien to it's own, regards the other as it's natural ene- my.
 "To tie warm and enthusiastic pietist the enquirer appears as hater of God, an inveterate blasphemer of holy things, soil ing with rude and insolent hands what ought only to be humbly adored. The saint when he has the power, calls the sword to his aid, and in his zeal for what he calls the honor of God, makes war upon such people with steel and fire. The innovator, on the other hand, knowing that he is not that evil crea- ture which his rival represents him as being, knowing that he, too, desires on- times at stake and scafold, suffers in our own later days in good name, in reputa- tion, in worldly fortune and as the whirl- agig of times brings round his turn of tri- umph, takes, in French revolutions and such other fits of madness, his own period of wild revenge The service of truth is made to appear as one thing, the service of God as another and in that fatal separa- tion religion dishonors itself with unavail- ing enmity to what nevertheless 1t is com pelled at last to accept in humiliation and science, welcoming the character which its adversaries fling upon 1t, turns away with answering hostility from doctrines without which it's own highest achievements are but pyramids of ashes.
 [" Is this antagonism law of humanity? As mankind move upwards through the as- cending circles of progress, is it forever to be with them as with the globe which they inhabit-of which one hemisphere is per petually dark? Have the lessons of the Reformation been thrown away? Is knowl- l edge always to advance under the ban of religion? Is faith never to cease to dread investigation? Is science chiefly to value each new discovery as victory gained over its rival? Is the spiritual world to re- volve eternally upon an axis of which the two poles are materialism and superstition, to be buried in their alternate occultations in periods of utter darkness, or lifted into an icy light where there is neither life nor warmth?"
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