Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

FROM THE DIVINE ORACLES TO THE HIGHER
366
CRITICISM.
between the old and the new than could have been framed
by engineers more learned but less astute. Evidently Pope
Leo XIII is neither a Paul V nor an Urban VIII, and is too
wise to bring the Church into a position from which it can
only be extricated by such ludicrous subterfuges as those by
which it was dragged out of the Galileo scandal, or by such
a tortuous policy as that by which it writhed out of the old
doctrine regarding the taking of interest for money.
In spite, then, of the attempted crushing out of Bartolo
and Berta and Savi and Lenormant and Loisy, during this
very epoch in which the Pope issued this encyclical, there
is every reason to hope that the path has been paved over
which the Church may gracefully recede from the old system
of interpretation and quietly accept and appropriate the
main results of the higher criticism. Certainly she has never
had a better opportunity to play at the game of " beggar my
neighbour " and to drive the older Protestant orthodoxy into
bankruptcy.
In America the same struggle between the old ideas and
the new went on. In the middle years of the century the
first adequate effort in behalf of the newer conception of the
sacred books was made by Theodore Parker at Boston. A
thinker brave and of the widest range, a scholar indefatigable
and of the deepest sympathies with humanity, a man
called by one of the most eminent scholars in the English
Church " a religious Titan," and by a distinguished French
theologian " a prophet," he had struggled on from the divinity
school until at that time he was one of the foremost bib-
lical scholars, and preacher to the largest regular congregation
on the American continent. The great hall in Boston
could seat four thousand people, and at his regular discourses
every part of it was filled. In addition to his pastoral work
he wielded a vast influence as a platform speaker, especially
in opposition to the extension of slavery into the Territories
of the United States, and as a lecturer on a wide range of
vital topics and ; among those whom he most in-
profoundly
fluenced, both politically and religiously, was Abraham Lincoln.
During each year at that period he was heard discussing
the most important religious and political questions in
but his most lasting work was
all the greater Northern cities ;
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