and garb of a world-wide religion, looked down on me with the unknown eyes of an alien and Oriental faith.  ’Stranger, why lingerest thou in this broken tomb,’ I seemed to hear from silent voices in that death of time; and still, when my thoughts seek the Mother-Church of Christendom, they go, not to St. John Lateran by the Roman wall, but are pilgrims to the low marshes, the white water lilies, the lone Byzantine ruin that even the sea has long abandoned.

“The Mother-Church?—­is then this personal religious life only a state of orphanage?  Because true life necessarily begins in the independent self, must it continue without the sheltering of the traditional past, the instructed guidance of older wisdom, and man’s joint life in common which by association so enlarges and fortifies the individual good?  Why should one not behave with respect to religion as he does in other parts of life?  It is our habit elsewhere in all quarters to recognize beyond ourselves an ampler knowledge, a maturer judgment, a more efficient will enacting our own choice.  To obey by force is a childish or a slavish act, but intelligently and willingly to accept authority within just limits is the reasonable and practical act of a free man in society; the recognition of this by a youth marks his attainment of intellectual majority.  Authority, in all its modes, is the bond of the commonwealth; until the youth comprehends it he is a ward; thereafter he is either a rebel or a citizen, as he lists.  For us, born to the largest measure of freedom society has ever known, there is little fear lest the principle of authority should prove a dangerous element.  The right of private judgment, which is, I believe, the vital principle of the intellectual life, is the first to be exercised by our young men who lead that life; and quite in the spirit of that education which would repeat in the child the history of the race, we are scarce out of the swaddling bands of the primer and catechism before we would remove all questions to the court of our own jurisdiction.  The mind is not a tabula rasa at birth, we learn, but, so soon as may be, we will remedy that, and erase all records copied there.  The treasure doors of our fathers’ inheritance are thrown open to us; but we will weigh each gold piece with balance and scale.  All that libraries contain, all that institutions embody, all the practice of life which, in its innocence, mankind has adopted as things of use and wont, shall be certified by our scrutiny.  So in youth we say, and what results?  What do the best become?  Incapables, detached from the sap of life, forced to escape to the intellectual limbo of a suspension of judgment, extending till it fills heaven and earth.  We no longer discuss opinions even; the most we can attain to is an attitude of mind.  In view of the vast variety of phases in which even man’s great ideas have been held, a sense of indifference among them, a vacuity in all, grows up.  Pilate’s question, ’What is truth?’ ends all.