Without it, one would be rudderless
indeed--a castaway in a cockleshell boat on a furious sea--and from
one's lips would go up a cry like to that wrung from a famous infidel:
"I am affrighted and confounded with the forlorn solitude in which I am
placed by my philosophy . . .begin to fancy myself in the most
deplorable condition imaginable, environed by the deepest darkness."
No, Mahony was not one of those who held that the Christian faith, that
fine flower of man's spiritual need, would suffer detriment by the
discarding of a few fabulous tales; nor did he fear lest his own faith
should become undermined by his studies. For he had that in him which
told him that God was; and this instinctive certainty would persist, he
believed, though he had ultimately to admit the whole fabric of
Christianity to be based on the Arimathean's dream. It had already
survived the rejection of externals: the surrender of forms, the
assurance that ceremonials were not essential to salvation belonged to
his early student-days. Now, he determined to send by the board the last
hampering relics of bigotry and ritual. He could no longer concede the
tenets of election and damnation. God was a God of mercy, not the blind,
jealous Jahveh of the Jews, or the inhuman Sabbatarian of a narrow
Protestantism. And He might be worshipped anywhere or anyhow: in any
temple built to His name--in the wilderness under the open sky--in
silent prayer, or according to any creed.
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