n the sun rose or went down,--yes, many a savage,
his hands smeared all over with human sacrifice,--shall come from
the East and the West, and sit down in the kingdom of God, with Moses
and Zoroaster, with Socrates and Jesus." (Discourses, p. 83) The
charity which hopes that men may be forgiven the crime of "religions"
which, if there be a God at all, must be "abominations," one can
understand; but these maudlin apologies for the religions themselves,
--as if they were not themselves crimes, and involved crimes in
their very practice,--I do not understand. According to this, all
that man has to do is to be sincere in any thing, however diabolical,
and it is at once transmuted into a virtue which nothing less than
heaven can reward!

Mr. Newman sometimes follows closely in Mr. Parker's steps in the
exercise of this bastard toleration, this spurious charity; though,
in justice, I must say, he does not go his length. Yet who can read
without laughter that definition of idolatry, made apparently for
the same preposterous purpose,--to sanctify the hideous absurdities
of the "religious sentiment," and to save the credit of the "internal
oracle"? He says,--"To worship as perfect and infinite one whom we
know to be imperfect and finite, this is idolatry, and (in any bad
sense) this alone ...... A man can but adore his own highest ideal;
to forbid this is to forbid all religion to him. If, therefore,
idolatry is to mean any thing wrong and bad, the word must be reserved
for the cases in which a man degrades his ideal by worshipping
something that falls short of it." (Soul, pp. 55, 56)

So that the most degraded idolater, if he but come up to his own
ideal of the Divinity, is none at all, but a respectable worshipper!
It may be; but the idolater's ideal of God is, generally, the reality
of what others call the Devil!--Only think of the divine ideal of a
man who worships an image of his own making, with ten heads and twenty
hands! The definition reminds me of that passage in which Pascal's
Jesuit Father defines the moral sin of "idleness":--"It is," says
he, "a grief that spiritual things should be spiritual, as if
it should be regretted that the sacraments are the source of grace;
and it is a mortal sin." "O Father!" said I, "I cannot imagine that
any one can be idle in such a sense." "So Escobar says, 'I confess
it is very seldom that any person fails into the sin of idleness.'
Now, surely, you must see the necessity of a good