Infinite Wisdom clothed itself in parables, that the people might be
instructed, and the people thronged to hear. The truths of Philosophy
and Religion are of an interest more universal to humanity than the
truths of all other science, for the first is to know one's self, and
the second to know one's God; and yet the majority of teachers cover
them with such a body of technicalities and abstractions, that it is
vain for the mass of mankind to endeavor to penetrate to the soul
within.
If the clergy of the Protestant Church would spend more strength in
illustrating the Infinite Wisdom contained in the parables of the Lord,
and less in amplifying the abstractions of St. Paul, they would gather
around them bands of listeners far more numerous and more devout than
those that now attend their ministrations. It was one of the grand
mistakes of that Church, at its first separation from the Romish, that,
in its terror of the worship of material images, it passed into the
opposite extreme of the worship of abstractions. This is one reason why
Protestantism has made no advance in Europe since the death of the first
Reformers, and why there is so little vital religion among the races by
whom it was adopted.
Much has been done of late to render the natural sciences familiar and
attractive to the popular mind, by lectures and books that bring them
within the comprehension of all: and it is to be hoped, that, beginning
thus with the material parts of the universe, mankind may be gradually
led from matter to mind, from science to religion.
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