Yet it is not from the practical ministers of religion, that the great opposition to religious reform proceeds.  The “secular clergy” (as the Romanists oddly call them) were seldom so bigoted as the “regulars.”  So with us, those who minister to men in their moral trials have for the most part a deeper moral spirit, and are less apt to place religion in systems of propositions.  The robur legionum of bigotry, I believe, is found,—­first, in non-parochial clergy, and next in the anonymous writers for religious journals and “conservative” newspapers; who too generally[3] adopt a style of which they would be ashamed, if the names of the writers were attached; who often seem desirous to make it clear that it is their trade to carp, insult, or slander; who assume a tone of omniscience, at the very moment when they show narrowness of heart and judgment.  To such writing those who desire to promote earnest Thought and tranquil Progress ought anxiously to testify their deep repugnance.  A large part of this slander and insult is prompted by a base pandering to the (real or imagined) taste of the public, and will abate when it visibly ceases to be gainful.

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The law of God’s moral universe, as known to us, is that of Progress.  We trace it from old barbarism to the methodized Egyptian idolatry; to the more flexible Polytheism of Syria and Greece; the poetical Pantheism of philosophers, and the moral monotheism of a few sages.  So in Palestine and in the Bible itself we see, first of all, the image-worship of Jacob’s family, then the incipient elevation of Jehovah above all other Gods by Moses, the practical establishment of the worship of Jehovah alone by Samuel, the rise of spiritual sentiment under David and the Psalmists, the more magnificent views of Hezekiah’s prophets, finally in the Babylonish captivity the new tenderness assumed by that second Isaiah and the later Psalmists.  But ceremonialism more and more encrusted the restored nation; and Jesus was needed to spur and stab the conscience of his contemporaries, and recal them to more spiritual perceptions; to proclaim a coming “kingdom of heaven,” in which should be gathered all the children of God that were scattered abroad; where the law of love should reign, and no one should dictate to another.  Alas! that this great movement had its admixture of human imperfection.  After this, Steven the protomartyr, and Paul once him persecutor, had to expose the emptiness of all external santifications, and free the world from the law of Moses. Up to this point all Christians approve of progress; but at this point they want to arrest it.