bet of letters, the Arabic numerals, or the Constitution; for,
as these are the monuments of past achievement and an advantage we have
at our start over savage man, so in religion there are as well
established results of life already lived. Though the religious life be
personal, it is not more so than all life of thought and emotion; and in
it we do not begin at the beginning of time any more than in other parts
of life. We begin with an inheritance of many experiments hitherto, of
many methods, of a whole race-history of partial error, partial truth;
and we take up the matter where our fathers laid it down, with the
respect due to their earnest toil, their sincere effort and trial, their
convictions; and the youth who does not feel their impressiveness as
enforcing his responsibility has as nascent a life in religion as he
would have, in the similar case, in learning or in citizenship.

"The question of authority in the religious life, however, is more
specific than this, and is not to be met by an admission of the general
respect due to the human past and its choicer spirits, and our
dependence thereon for the fostering of instinctive impulses,
direction, and the confirmation of our experience. It is organized
religion that here makes its claim to fealty, as organized liberty,
organized justice do, in man's communal life. There is a joint and
general consent in the masses of men with similar experience united
into the Church, with respect to the religious way of life, similar to
that of such masses united into a government with respect to secular
things. The history of the Church with its embodied dogmas--the past of
Christendom--contains that consent; and the Church founds its claim to
veneration on this broad accumulation of experience, so gathered from
all ages and all conditions of men as to have lost all traces of
individuality and become the conviction of mankind to a degree that no
free constitution and no legal code can claim. To substitute the simple
faith of the young heart, however immediate, in the place of this hoary
and commanding tradition is a daring thing, and may seem both arrogance
and folly; to stand apart from it, though willing to be taught within
the free exercise of our own faculties, abashes us; and it is necessary,
for our own self-respect, to adopt some attitude toward the Church
definitely, not as a part of the common mass of race-tradition in a
diffused state like philosophy, but as an inst