Similar mistakes are made by individuals and by nations in the development of the religious faculty, and the consequences are worse than even drunkenness: thereof history furnishes terrible examples, on a small scale by individuals, or on a great scale by nations—Abraham sacrificing his only son, Spain butchering her subjects by the hundred thousand, because they could not believe what was unbelievable.
In mankind's religious development, as in yours and mine, three things are indispensable, namely—emotions, religious feelings, which come directly from the spontaneous action of this religious faculty itself; ideas, which come from the reflective action of the intellect; and actions, which come from the will, influenced by emotions and ideas.
These ideas are the middle term, between emotions and actions; they, reach forward and create deeds, they reach backward and cause emotions, which create new deeds. The sum of ideas in religious matters is. what men call theology—thoughts about God, about man, and about the relation between God and man. Now as true religion is piety, the love of God, and morality, the keeping of his laws; so a true theology is the science whereof religion is the practice—theology the intellectual part, as piety is the emotional part, and morality the practical part. A true theology helps both piety and morality; a false theology hinders each. Now the character of the theological ideas which men attain to and believe in, will depend mainly on the method in which they seek for theologic truth; a false method will ultimately lead to a false theology and its consequences; and a true method will ultimately lead to a true theology and its consequences; the road from Boston to Salem will never carry the travellers to Roxbury, though so much nearer at hand. As the theology which is accepted has such an immense influence on the individual, the community, the nation, or the race which accepts it, you see how important it is to have a right method in theology. It is not the highest end of life to attain wealth, honour, power, fame, but to build up a religious character, noble in kind, great in quantity; to be a complete man, with a whole, sound body, developed
