le
goes right on; and so it sometimes comes to pass that the moral ideal
has outgrown the religious ideal of the community. And now, as a
practical illustration to illume the whole point, let us go back to
ancient Athens for a moment at the time of Socrates. Here we are
confronted with the curious fact that Socrates, who has been regarded
from that day to this as the most grandly moral man of his time, the
one man who taught the highest and noblest human ideals, is put to
death as an irreligious man. The popular religion of the time cast him
out, and put the hemlock to his lips; and at the same time his teaching
in regard to righteousness and truth was unspeakably ahead of the
popular religion of his day.

Let us come to the modern Athens for a moment, to the time of Theodore
Parker in Boston. We are confronted here, again, with this strange
fact. There was not a church in Boston that could abide him, not even
the Unitarian churches; and in the prayer-meetings of the day they were
beseeching God to take him out of the world, because they thought he
was such a force for evil. And at the same time Theodore Parker stood
for the very highest, tenderest, truest moral ideal of his age.

There was no man walking the earth at that time who so grandly voiced
the real law of God as did Theodore Parker. And yet he was outcast by
the popular religious sentiment of his time.

This, then, is what I mean when I say that we ought to be careful, and
study and think in forming our religious ideals, and see that we do not
identify our own unwillingness to think with the eternal and changeless
law of God. This is what I have meant in some of the strictures which I
have uttered during the last year upon some of the theological creeds
of the time. The people have grown to be better than their creeds, but
they have not yet developed the courage to make those creeds utter the
highest and finest things which they think and feel. This is what I
have meant when I have said that the character of God as outlined in
many of these creeds is away behind and below the noblest and finest
and sweetest ideals of what we regard as fitting even to humanity
to-day.

Religion, then, may be ahead of the moral ideal or it may be behind it.
The particular type of religion I mean, of course, which is being held
at any particular time in the history of the world. But the moral ideal
of necessity goes on, keeping step with the social experience of the
race.