nged with gold,"--pervaded
and penetrated throughout their dusky depths by that mercy which assures
us that, in some intelligible sense, this condition of man is contrary
to the Divine Will, which, from the first, resolved to remedy it; and
that a day is coming when what is mysterious shall be explained,--so
far, at least, that what has been "wrong" shall be "righted." But what
is the theory of the universe propounded by these writers? So hideous
(I solemnly declare it) that I feel ten times more compelled to reject
the universe as a work of an infinitely gracious, wise, and powerful
Creator, than if the difficulties had been simply left where the Bible
leaves them. According to their theory, man is now, just what he was
at first,--as he came from his Creator's hand; or rather in some parts
of the world (thanks to himself though) a little better than he was
originally; that God cast man forth, so constituted by the unhappy
mal-admixture of the elements of his nature,--with such an inevitable
subjection of the "idea" to the "conception," of the "spiritual
faculty" to "the degraded types,"--that for unnumbered ages--for
aught we know, myriads of ages--man has been slowly crawling up,
a very sloth in "progress" (poor beast!), from the lowest Fetichism
to Polytheism,--from Polytheism, in all its infinitude of degrading
forms, to imperfect forms of Monotheism; and how small a portion of
the race have even imperfectly reached this last term, let the
spectacle of the world's religions at the present moment proclaim!
From the more imperfect forms of Monotheism, the race is gradually
to make "progress" to something else,--Heaven knows what! but
certainly something still far below the horizon,--still concealed in
the illimitable future. For this gradual transformation from the
veriest religions grub into the spiritual Psyche, man was expressly
equipped by the constitution of his nature,--he was created this
grub. For all this truly geological spiritualism, and for all the
infinitude of hideous superstitions and cruel wrongs involved in the
course of this precious development, Mr. Parker tells us there was a
necessity,--nothing less! It was necessary, no doubt for his logic,
that he should say so; but, apart from his own argumentative exigencies,
it is impossible even to imagine any necessity whatever. It was an
"ordeal," it seems, through which man was obliged to pass. What is all
this, but to acknowledge the unaccountable nature