Liberal Thought in America 151 



of Theodore Parker, freed us from the spectre of 

 bibliolatry, it might indeed be said that the pro- 

 mise of the Protestant Reformation was at length 

 fulfilled. The change wrought in the Unitarian 

 church since Parker began his preaching has been 

 to some extent followed by analogous changes in 

 other churches. On every side, the last quarter of 

 the nineteenth century has been preeminently the 

 age of the decomposition of orthodoxies. Here 

 and there and everywhere they are crumbling into 

 ruins ; and as the world has long since left be- 

 hind the age of trilobites and the age of dinosaurs, 

 so in the world to which we are coming there will 

 be neither a place nor a use for orthodoxies. 



For, as I must observe in conclusion, there is 

 all about us a resistless and world-wide influence 

 at work, to which all the temporary and local 

 causes I have mentioned have been but the minis- 

 tering servants. From age to age, our knowledge 

 is growing from more to more. From the discov- 

 ery of America, from the astronomy of Copernicus 

 and the physics of Galileo, down to the universal 

 doctrine of evolution in our own time, there has 

 been one grand coherent and consecutive tale of 

 ever enlarging, ever more organized knowledge of 

 the world in which we live. By this enlarged ex- 

 perience our minds are affected, from day to day 



