# The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 03/Discourse 08

Religion is one of the most important of the concerns of man. It comes from the deepest and most powerful of all our spiritual faculties. More than any one element of consciousness it helps mould the character of the individual and the nation. The ideas we form of God, of man, of the relation between them, of the mode of learning our religious duty, and of our final condition in the future world—these affect all the concerns of the nation. For they found institutions which shape the politics, the business, and the literature of the people, so ultimately determining their condition for weal and woe. The theology of Spain is one of the prime causes of her ruin; American slavery not only has one of its roots in the selfishness of the planter and the politician, but also another under the meeting-house, where it is watered by the eaves-droppings of the popular theology. At the opening of a new place for religious meetings, which is already consecrated thereunto by your presence and the prayer of your heart, I ask your attention to some thoughts on the relation between the ​ THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTIONS AND THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
In the historical progress of many thousand years, out of material nature man has developed all the visible property of the ten hundred million inhabitants of earth. Thence come the pastures, farms, and gardens; the houses, markets, temples, roads of earth, wood, stone, or iron; the towns and cities, the forts and fleets; all the tools of industry or destruction; the instruments for use; the ornaments for beauty. All these are of human creation-thoughts organized in things. Man's mind is their father; the world of matter is the mother thereof. God made us spirit : He gives us matter, and thence have we made all these things which constitute the world of art.
This world of art, thought organized in matter, contains at present two parts: First, What we inherit—our traditional part; and second, What we create—our original part. The traditional requires to be looked over anew. Some of it is of present value and will last longer, perhaps for ever; some of it is no more fit for present use, but must be left to perish, the new and better taking its place. When Xerxes invaded Europe draw-bows were his best weapons of attack, his arrows darkened the air of Thermopylae; now the allied armies at Sebastopol have not a bow-string in all their scientific camp. Once a hatchet of stone was mankind's best tool for creative industry; now axes of steel have driven the tomahawk out of all markets.
All this world of art shares the progress of man; becomes greater in quantity, nicer in quality. It is amenable to perpetual improvement; is revised continually, the good kept, the useless left to perish. Time winnows all harvests with rugged breath—great clouds of chaff go flying all abroad, while the useful grain is thankfully gathered up. The highway of history is marked by works abandoned, tools that have served out their time, superseded, disbanded, left alone.
This all men agree to. None refuses bread because his fathers once fed on acorns and beech-nuts; no woman disdains to ride well-clad in a railroad car, because her mothers only walked, and that barefoot and naked. And what an odds between the savage's world of art and yours ​ to-day; between this "Indian country" of 1555, and the Pennsylvania of 1855! All this difference comes from the civilized thought mixed with the savage world of matter. The advance is progression by experiment—wherein many attempts fail. Of all the inventions recorded in the Patent Office, how few are adopted into permanent use!—the rest are winnowed off as chaff. But without the straw there could have been no corn.
In his historic progress, out of human nature man developes feelings, thoughts, and actions, and thence forms institutions, arts, languages, laws, sciences, states, societies, and the like. All these together make up the world of institutions. A machine is a contrivance of thought organized in matter; an institution a contrivance of thought organized in man. Of each there are many forms.
All the feelings, all the thoughts, all the actions, with all the manifold institutions of these thousand million men now on earth, have grown out of human nature, and correspond to the degree of man's progressive culture thereof; just as all the vegetation of the earth has grown out of its soil, and represents its climate, the richness of the ground, and the advance of the season, all varying continually. Since the world was created all vegetation has been domestic development, not foreign importation: not a camomile flower, not an apple- seed has been brought in from abroad—or could have been. These institutions have come partly from the instincts of men— acting blindly, not knowing whither they went; partly also from deliberate affection and conscious will—men setting a purpose and then devising means for that end. But all these institutions are of human origin, as much so as the machines—the family and the state not less than the axe of stone or iron, the farm or the railroad.
In our world of institutions there are also two parts— the inherited, and the newly created. Each partakes of the character of the age whence it came. The traditional must be revised; some of it is good for the present—nay, for all time; some must be left to perish. The original will be winnowed in the same way by such as come after us. Once the polygamous family of the savage, with his captive wives whom force subordinated to him but no mutual love conjoined, was the best domestic institution of ​ mankind. A military despotism was once the best tool man had devised for political work. Where are such things now? Human history is marked by the institutions cast off and left behind. What once is borne as the banner in front of humanity, the symbol of its purpose and the gathering point of its heroes, is one day thrown down in the dust as a worthless rag, and trodden by the rear-guard, nay, by the very stragglers of mankind. How many "settled opinions" of philosophers have perished; how much "immortal literature" has gone to the ground; while laws of Medes and Persians have been repealed by the supreme court of time, and become obsolete and forgotten by humanity. You may trace man's path through time as space by what he abandons. Ancient arrows and pestles are turned up by the farmer's plough, ancient policies and philosophies by the spade of the scholar—forms of the family or of the state successively built up out of human nature and successively crumbling down. In two thousand years the most progressive portion of the Anglo-Saxon tribe has left behind it absolute monarchy, limited monarchy, and aristocracy. In thirty or forty thousand years how much has the human race passed by I All these institutions, like the machines of the world of art, are amenable to perpetual improvement, subject to continual revision in the progressive development of mankind. You and I are not ashamed of a democracy because our fathers once swore allegiance to William the Conqueror, or patiently bore the yoke of Henry VIII.
What a difference between the savages world of institutions and that of the civilized man; between this "Indian country" of 1555, and the Pennsylvania of today, with your world of institutions, art, sciences, literature—domestic, social, and political customs. But all of this comes out of human nature—one attempt made after the other, many failing. Here also the advance is through progression by experiment. Look over the seventy volumes of statutes of the British Realm—through the history of medicine or machinery—see how much has become worthless, obsolete, and worn-out: laws lying there like spent bullets flattened out and rusted through; engines exploded long ago; medicines which humanity ​ no longer swallows down; these are the potsherds and arrow-heads which mark the track of mankind. Half the weeds of our fields were brought here as herbs indispensable to man.
In an institution the chief thing to look at is the idea it represents—the primordial thought; for that is the human mould in which the human substance of the institution is cast, and as the sheep are filled "according to their pasture," so the institution is like the idea which controls its shape. In thought you melt away all the matter of the solar system, conceiving of the sun and planets as mere mathematic points of force, and by this abstraction you can easier understand the mechanism of the heavens. In like manner, from institutions you may dissolve away the men who form them or are formed thereby, and consider only the ideas they represent, and by this abstraction the easier and better understand the mechanism of humanity.
​ These Ecclesiastical Institutions, including therein all the emotions, ideas, and actions they embody, are of human origin. They are the contrivances which man makes for his purpose, his machinery of religion; the substance and the form are alike human. But as the object of religious reverence is Divine, not human, so it comes to be alleged that these institutions came down straightway from God. Astronomy deals with thp stars, and navigation with the deep: shall it then be said that Newton's Principia and Blunt's Coast Pilot came miraculous, the one from the heavens and the other from the sea? It were not more absurd. It does not appear that any foreign element of thought has been added to man's consciousness since the first creation. There is perpetual development from within, no importation from another sphere. As the world of material nature was fashioned as a perfect means for a perfect purpose, so the world of human nature is equally adequate for its Creator's design, neither getting nor needing additions from any foreign source. All that is in human consciousness originated there—from man's contact with his surroundings, and from himself.
There is one great idea common to all Ecclesiastical Institutions: the idea of God, the Divine above the human. All nations, above the wild man, agree in this point—There is a God; but differ in the character and conduct they ascribe to him. They agree as to his being, and differ as to his being this or that. For, as the plants of Nova Zembla differ from those of Sumatra, not less do the theological ideas of the savage differ from those of the civilized and enlightened. There are zones of religious as of material vegetation, arctic and tropical.
In Ecclesiastical Institutions there is something which is general, human, and belongs to all forms of religion coming from nations in that stage of development; and also something else peculiar to the particular people. So all men agree in what makes them men, but differ in what makes one John and the other James. In the last four or five thousand years there have been seven great forms or religion, or Ecclesiastical Institutions, in the world,—the Vedantic, Old Indian of South Asia; the Hebrew; the ​ Classic, Greek and Roman; the Zoroastrian; the Buddhistic; the Christian; and the Mahometan;—which have had a wide and deep influence on the welfare of mankind. They all have some things in common, while in others they widely differ.
The religious element—call it the soul—begins its activity with emotions—mere feelings; these lead to thoughts, and they to actions; and thus, little by little, Ecclesiastical Institutions get formed, the human instrument or machinery for expressing the idea, embodying the action, and thus attaining the object of the religious emotion. These institutions, like all others, are of gradual formation. Their influence, for good or ill, depends on the character of the idea embodied therein, and on their fitness for the special nation who accepts it. It is machinery in the human mill. When an Ecclesiastical Institution is fixed, and incapable of progressive amendment to suit the advancing consciousness of the people, it is a curse; and the nation which continually submits to it is first hindered and finally destroyed thereby. But while nations perish, mankind still survives; as the ocean endures for ever, while wave after wave rises successive and successive falls. If Spain be spiritually dead—the once noble tree killed by clipping its limbs, and girdling its trunk, and boring into its root—other trees spring out of the procreant earth and grow to mighty columns of green beauty. A living and progressive nation is continually altering its Ecclesiastic Institutions, as it improves its other machinery, industrial or political. Thus three thousand years ago the Ecclesiastic Institutions of the Teutonic people represented the old pagan ideas of Divinity, and suited the worship of Thor, Odin, or Hertha; the Teutons outgrew this form of religion, and accepted the Roman Christian ideas, with the Roman Christian institutions ; these were at length passed by, and now most of the Teutons have accepted the German Christian ideas with the corresponding institutions, and are preparing for another progressive step.
Now in our present Ecclesiastical Institutions there is an inherited and a newly-created part; the old must be revised, for while it contains what is true, and, therefore, permanently good and fair, it has also things good for once but not good for ever, and others not good at all. ​ What fits must be kept, the rest cast off. For the Ecclesiastical Institutions, like all other human contrivances, are amenable to perpetual improvement, and must be made to represent the total development of the nation which accepts and retains them.
There are now three great Ecclesiastical Institutions which occupy the civilized and half-civilized parts of the world, the Buddhistic, the Christian, the Mahometan. These represent the three great world-sects into which the foremost nations are now divided. The Christian is made up of Hebrew, Zoroastrian, and classic elements; it contains also some things derived from Jesus of Nazareth, and many more from Paul of Tarsus, who systematized what Jesus begun; and yet others, added from various sources since his time.
There are two things which pass tinder the name of "Christianity." One is natural piety and morality—the love of God and the keeping of His commandments; I will here call this the Christian religion. The other is a scheme of theological doctrines and opinions which from time to time have accumulated, and are now brought down to us with numerous ecclesiastical ceremonies; I will call this the Christian theology, though in many important matters it differs widely from the recorded doctrines and opinions of Jesus himself.
It is this theology which shapes the Ecclesiastical Institutions of Christendom; it is the idea whereof they are the embodiment, the substance to which they are the form. When priests and ministers speak of "Christianity" they commonly mean the "Christian theology," not the "Christian religion." Men who believe this theology and comply with its circumjacent ceremonies are called "Christians;" not such as have merely the "Christian religion," who are called only "amiable men," "deists," "infidels," and the like. To be "converted" is to accept this theology with its ceremonies. When it is said, "Christianity frees the slave, elevates woman, humanizes man, saves the soul," the meaning is that this is done by the Christian theology.
Now to understand the good and ill of these institutions, their relation to the religious consciousness of the American people, and their consequent influence on our present con​ dition and future development, let us look at some of the chief ideas therein—that is, at some of the great theological doctrines of Christendom itself. To do this I will treat of Christendom as a whole, looking only at the great bulk of Christians, and neglecting. certain small and exceptional bodies who reject more or less of those ideas, and whose power is only infinitesimal. For I do not care to inquire after the fate of each single bucketful of water ladled out to moisten a lady's rose-bush, but to learn the general direction and current of the great stream of influence which comes from these institutions.
Dissolving away all accidental matter, I will look only at some substantive ideas which are qualitatively common to all Christendom after making the exceptions above referred to. I omit also many excellent doctrines which the Christian has in common with the other world-sects, and some peculiar to itself, and ask your attention to the five great false ideas of this theology which are embodied in the Ecclesiastical Institutions of Christendom.
I. Of the false idea op God.—The ecclesiastical idea of God represents him as deficient in all the great essentials of Deity except eternal self-existence. He is imperfect in power, in wisdom, in justice, in benevolence, and in holiness—fidelity to Himself.
1. Imperfect in power.—He cannot accomplish His purpose; the devil, His perpetual enemy, routs Him in every great battle, and at last will fill an immense hell with the damned, the pick and flower of all the world, who stream thither in vast crowds, overflowing the broad way to destruction, while the narrow road which leads the elect to salvation is thinly dotted "with here and there a traveller."
2. Imperfect in wisdom.—He does not know how His own contrivance will work until set a-going; and then its wheels do not run in human history as in the divine head. Thus the "Fall" of Adam is as much a surprise to God as to man; only the serpent understood it beforehand. The wickedness of the human race, both before and after the "flood," is an astonishment to God, who repented that He had made man, the work proving so defective and even pernicious. God learns by experiments, whereof many turn out failures; so He must destroy His work and try ​ again, not always succeeding the second or third time—nor even in the end.
3. Imperfect in justice.—He often violates the moral sense which He has put into human nature, is deceitful and intensely cruel: witness the command to Abraham for sacrificing Isaac, to Moses to butcher the Canaanites; witness the triumph of the "Lamb" in the book of Revelation, with his oriental army of two hundred million cavalry, destroying a third part of the human race in one quarter of the world, and the rest of his military servants in the western quarter, in one campaign making a spot of blood on the ground two hundred miles in its shortest diameter and thirty-six inches deep. All this is represented, not as an incident in the historical development of man, or as instrumental to some advantage for any one, but only as a voluntary purpose in the consciousness of God, an end in itself—the calculated achievement of His spontaneous providence.
4. Imperfect in His benevolence.—For while He loves some He hates more, and continually creates men foredoomed to eternal damnation. He is a jealous God, and gives "salvation" in the stingiest way. Nay, voluntarily and on purpose, He created the devil, who is now a being absolutely evil. Of course He created him out of the absolute evil which was in Himself—there could be no other source for this material, for God's nature is a terminality of beginning as well as His purpose a finality of endings from an evil motive, for an evil purpose, and as an appropriate means thereunto. The devil is not merely a mistake and a failure, but an intended marplot of the universe, a premeditated contradiction. This fly in the ointment of the apothecary does no good in heaven, earth, or hell, and is devised and intended for no good, helping neither any benevolent purpose of God, nor the development of man.
​ It is plain that no Christian sect conceives of God as infinitely perfect in power, wisdom, justice, benevolence, and holiness. In their general description they all claim absolute perfection for their notion of Deity; in their specific details of character and conduct they all deny it. The idea of the infinitely perfect God is foreign to the Christian theology.
II. Of the false idea of man.—Man was created "in the image and likeness of God," but so badly made that he became an easy prey to the devil. His first step was a "fall," which so damaged his "nature" that ever since it has been "corrupt"—this action, even his thoughts "only evil continually." His body is damaged, and unnaturally mortal—at present not even living out a tithe of the original years of even fallen man; his mind—and he cannot distinguish between truth and error, unless a miracle intervene, nor always then; his conscience—he does not know good from evil; his heart—which is perverse and desperately wicked; his soul—that of itself would neither love nor even know God, or its own immortality. He is "depraved," if not "totally"—which is the instantial opinion of Christendom—at least "generally" and "effectually," so that he is substantially good for nothing; in his flesh and his spirit there is "no good thing!" He is immortal—so much the worse for him! What avails it to increase the quantity of human life while the quality is so bad and the ultimate ruin made sure of beforehand? Damnation alone waits for the souls of the mass of men, He can find out nothing certain about God ; all the holy men who taught new religious truth to mankind did not actively learn the truth as men, but only passively received it from God, as bare pipes through which His "Revelation" flowed forth: they did not normally find out a truth, but God miraculously gave them a commandment.
All the rest of God's works are "perfect;" they turn out as He meant, and are adequate means for His purposes; but man is a failure—this wheel does not run well in the universal mill, nor accomplish the purpose it was intended for! Nay, with all manner of watching and mending, and lubricating with miracles, it works very ill, and God is sorry He made man on the earth, and it grieves ​ Him at His heart! Man's hand is perfect, his eye, his foot—the nervous system is complete and perfect as the solar system; but his "nature," his "heart," is evil, and only evil, and that continually!
III. Of the false idea of the relation between God and man.—There is an antagonism between the two, total and eternal—their "natures" irreconcilably conflicting; depraved man at variance with imperfect God! History is chiefly the record of this mutual hostility and conflict, the story of man's rebellion and God's vengeance therefore! Nay, the earth is a monument of the never-ending battle; the earthquakes and whirlwinds of its great elements, the thorns and thistles of vegetation, the strife of beasts of prey, and the "minor note" of the birds, all are alike the consequence and the memorial of this primeval but perpetual falling out between man and God. Eternity will repeat the antagonism—for as God once swept off procreant mankind by a transient flood of water, sparing but eight from a world of men, so at last He will ruin the majority of the whole human race in a permanent deluge of fire, wherein the million generations of men, each millions of millions strong, shall "perish everlastingly," in never-ending fiery rot, while He and the Devil alone shall take delight in this flaming massacre, this funeral pile of humanity, where the worm of agony dieth not in the fire of his wrath, which is not quenched for ever and ever. So perishable earth and ever-enduring hell are alike mementoes of this antagonistic relation; and God and His enemy, the Creator and the destroyer, are made one in their delight over the torment of the human race,—the devil gladdened that they fall and are "lost" from heaven, God rejoicing that they are damned and "found" in hell!
​ In the ecclesiastical conception of God there is a deep back-ground of evil. Now and then the mysterious cloud is miraculously lifted and lets men see the mountain summits of anger, vengeance, jealousy, and hate, and imagine the whole chain of malignity, Andes and Himalayas of wrath, hid underneath the veil. There is not a book in the Bible which justifies the inference that God loves his children who die in wickedness, or that His hell is for the welfare of its melancholy inmates, only for the vengeance of their Creator.
Out of this dark mass of evil in Himself He created the devil—absolutely evil—and hell; both to last for ever, each a finality. The devil is also a child of God, but not acknowledged—turned-off, an out-lying member of the Divine family, the Ishmael of the universe, his hand against God, God's against him. But after this mass of evil is subtracted and embodied in the devil, it is plain that evil still preponderates in the theological conception of God: for He does not bring the human race to a close, but still goes on creating new children of wrath, bowed down with the "sin" of "Adam's fall," before their birth doomed to eternal wretchedness. He might pardon, but He will not; stop creation, but He keeps the world going on, spawning whole shoals of people wherewith to fatten in hell! He might at least annihilate the damned; but even that were too merciful for His vindictive wrath; they must writhe in their agony for ever and ever!
Yet, though evil so far preponderates in the ecclesiastical idea of God, as shown in His conduct, some humane mercy is also ascribed to Him, with corresponding acts. He wishes to save a few brands from the burning of the world, to give some other men glimpses of a prospect of escape from ruin. So He prepares a scheme of "redemption" for a few—exceptions to the ruin of the rest.
IV. Of the false idea of inspiration. God communicated certain doctrines to various men, doctrines of revelation. They were not found out by the normal action of the various human faculties—intellectual, moral, affectional, and religious—for then they would be of human origin, and, like other opinions, amenable to mankind; but they were miraculously given by God himself to men in an ab​ normal passivity of their various human faculties; and are, accordingly, of Divine origin, not at all amenable to mankind. They are foreign plants miraculously brought from heaven and set out in our niggardly human soil. Inspiration takes place in this manner: the Spirit of God takes transient or continuous possession of a special person and acts through him; so the action is God's, and not man's—God the artist, man the tool. The doctrines thus miraculously communicated are infallible and authoritative—the standard measure of religion and morality. They are also a finality—when the revelation is once ended, nothing is ever to be added thereto; nought taken away. Revelation to one man is binding on all: thus words uttered by a half-civilized Hebrew, many centuries ago, in a state of ecstasy, or dream, or fit of wrath, must now be taken for the infallible oracles of God, by a man born with the highest genius and furnished with the most ample culture which the human race can bestow. He must accept every doctrine of revelation, though in direct variance with the noblest instincts of human nature and the demonstrations of human science. These doctrines of revelation, thus actively communicated by God and passively received by some man, are to be accounted as the primitive source of theological ideas—the fountain of all our knowledge of God and what pertains to religion; human reflection and imagination may only develope, but must not transcend, what lies latent in these seeds of knowledge!
V. Of the false idea of salvation.—In consequence of the misstep and "fall" of Adam, God is permanently angry with the human race and inclined to damn all men to eternal torment. But His wrath has been somewhat mitigated, appeased and diverted from certain persons in this manner: the Divine Being is composed of three undivided personalities, who are equal in all respects. The second person—called the Son, though eternal and self-subsisted, as much as the first person, the Father—by His own will and consent becomes a man, "incarnated" in Jesus of Nazareth, "the only begotten Son of God," "born of a virgin," with no other human parent. He takes on himself all the wrath which God the Father felt for mankind, is crucified, and thus one undivided third part of the un​ changeable and eternal God dies—yet the sum total of Godhead is not diminished by this temporary subtraction but comes to life again and rises from the dead. The "sufferings" of the Son are an "infinite expiation" and "satisfaction" to God for the sins of men, who may thus escape from hell by his "vicarious atonement," His "merits" are transferred to their account, and they may advance to heaven through his "imputed righteousness," the "Divine condition" of salvation. But men receive this Divine salvation—deliverance from hell by vicarious atonement, and admission to heaven by imputed righteousness—on certain terms, the "human condition" of salvation. And the terms are such that, of all who have hitherto lived, the "saved" are a most pitiful fraction compared to the "lost!" Hell is roomy and crowded, while heaven is narrow, but with many mansions all unoccupied! The great mass of men, before their birth, are doomed to eternal torment, whence no act of theirs can set them free. The whole "scheme of redemption," with the doctrines of revelation, the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of one undivided third part of the Godhead, salvation by Christ, has no other result but to save a handful, gleaned miraculously from the earthly field, while the great bulk of the human harvest, grown in so many centuries and reaped down by death, is shocked up by the devil for the threshing-floor of hell, where he and his angels shall flail at them for ever and ever, and winnow them with a fiery tempest of wrath, which lasts throughout all eternity.
These five false ideas are common to the three great parties into which the Christian Sect is divided—to the Greek church, the Latin church, and the German church. They all share the idea of an imperfect God—of a depraved and almost worthless human nature— of a relation of perpetual antagonism between God the Creator and man His work—of a miraculous inspiration, limited to a few persons—of a vicarious salvation, which helps only a few, while it leaves the great majority of mankind to perish for ever. These five false ideas are the chief thing in these Ecclesiastical Institutions, which take thence their peculiar form and special activity. ​ Omit, for the present, the specialities of the Greek church, which does not now influence the destinies of America, and consider, for a moment, the peculiar doctrine of the Latin and German churches—the other two-thirds of Christendom. To the above fire points common to all Christendom, the Latin or Roman Catholic church adds these two ideas.
1. The Roman church—that is, practically, the clergy thereof—are the sole depository of the miraculous revelation, and are still miraculously and infallibly inspired. They alone have, in its fulness, the traditional part of the ecclesiastical institution—as well oral as written; they alone can produce the original part—which is only a development of the germ in the old. Thus they, and they alone, can interpret the Divine ideas of revelation and administer the Divine institutions thence arising. They continue the state of inspiration, miraculously preserving the old, miraculously developing the new.
2. The Roman church—that is, practically, its clergy—is the exclusive steward of this "salvation by Christ," appointed as the agent of God with a special power of attorney from Him to do all matters and things which He might do were He actually resident on the earth, whence He has now withdrawn and seceded. The Roman church is to dictate the terms on which this salvation shall be served out to nations and individual persons; to bind or loose in doctrine, advancing men to heaven, or relegating them to hell. She is the actual vicegerent and representative of God on earth; substantially is God.
In virtue of these two ideas, the Roman church determines the doctrines to be believed and the deeds to be done as a condition of salvation. She is a finalitv, is the norm of faith and works. Conformity therewith is the exclusive condition of present favour and final acceptance with God. There must be no ultimate free spiritual individuality in religious matters, no private judgment in theology, as she is God's vicar to determine theological thought and religious action, for each individual taking the place of mind and conscience, heart and soul; and as the human faculties are "totally depraved," and she "infallibly inspired," it is a great gain for the human race to ​ have their spiritual work done for them by so competent a hand.
The Roman church claims to be a Divine institution, not at all human in origin, function, or responsibility, but wholly of God; and even to Him amenable only as a part of Himself, an expansion of the Godhead. No amount of contradiction in the Catholic doctrines, or of wickedness in, the infallible heads of the Church, diminishes the Divinity of the institution. She is one and indivisible, with absolute unity of doctrinal substance and practical form; no sects can be allowed, no historical progress in doctrine, for the ultimatum was attained at the very beginning. Accordingly the function of the Catholic priest is to administer the miraculous revelation—to dictate with authority the doctrines to be believed, the work to be done—and to communicate the vicarious salvation.
II. The German or Protestant church, entertaining these five false ideas common to Christendom, rejects the two subsidiary which are proper only to the Roman church, and developes this, which is her own peculiar and distinctive opinion: The Scriptures of the Old and New Testament are the sole depository of the miraculous revelation; they determine the doctrines to be believed, the works to be done, the conditions of salvation. They are the finality, the norm of faith and works. Conformity with them is the indispensable condition of present favour and final acceptance with God. Men must take the Bible as master; it is Divine in origin, function, and responsibility; nay, it is only an expansion of God. To the Catholic the Latin church is God, Deity embodied in the priesthood; to the Protestant the Bible is God, Deity bound up in a collection of books. The Bible contains all that man needs in theological matters, now and hereafter, all he can ever get—for it is not only God's word, but his last word, his last will and testament, for though living elsewhere He is now seceded and deceased from all direct communication with man. There is no inspiration now; it is all ended, the stream run dry. The Bible is signed, sealed, and delivered as and for the last will and testament of Almighty God.
But as there is no miraculous expounder of the miracul​ ous revelation, every man may and must interpret the Bible for himself. This is the weak part of this Ecclesiastical Institution considered as a finality: Each man has the right of private judgment, to determine the canon—what is Scripture; and the interpretation—what Scripture means. There may be individuality of opinion in religion as elsewhere. Within the lids of the Bible there is room for speculation. Nay, logically, the authority of the Bible itself is to be proved to the satisfaction of the individual before he accepts it as his master. Hence there can be no unity of doctrine or of form with the Protestants; and at the beginning the Teutonic individualism clove the new church into many parties, each having the general opinions of Protestantism and the special notions of Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and so forth.
The function of the Protestant minister is to administer the Bible, which contains the miraculous balm of salvation for the sin of depraved human nature; he must set forth the most important parts of the Bible, the doctrines, which are the essential and medicative substance of this balm. Hence come the efforts to distribute the Bible—the word of God—and doctrinal tracts, which contain the extract of Bible, the quintessence of the word of God. For as the strength of Samson lay not in his bones, and muscles, and sinews, but only in his hair, so the efficient and salvatory power of the Bible lies not in those beautiful parts which teach natural piety and natural morality, but only in its theological doctrines—especially in those five false ideas above set forth, which theological chemistry distils therefrom.
In both the Catholic and the Protestant churches all the fundamental theological doctrines are taught on external authority; the last appeal for the acceptance of doctrines is not to the consciousness of the individual believer pronouncing them just and true, but to the miraculous revelation declaring them Divine commands; not to the Spirit of God now in me, but what is alleged to have been the Spirit of God in some man long since dead and gone. Science rests on facts of consciousness and facts of observation, it is therefore "profane;" theology on the "said-so" of somebody, often of an anonymous writer in a rude and uncertain age, and is "Divine." One has the ​ evidence of human nature in us, and the world of matter out of us, and so roots into consciousness and observation; the other comes from the dictation of a minister or a priest, who dogmatizes at will about man, God, and the most important of all human concerns, and does not root into our spontaneous or reflected consciousness, and like doctrines of philosophy grow thence, but is only grasped by the will and thereby is retained.
In the Catholic church I ask, "What is truth; what is religion?" I am sent to the opinion of the Catholic church, which I must believe, not because it is true—for that would imply that I can myself determine what is true but because the infallible church says it must be believed. So, as evidence of a theological doctrine—the existence of God, the immortality of the soul—I have the word of a Roman priest!
In the Protestant church I ask the same question, and am sent to the opinion of somebody in the New Testament or the Old. I am told to believe the doctrine, not because it is true, conformable to my own nature, bat because it is written in the infallible Scriptures. And as evidence for a theological doctrine—the nature of God, or man, or daily duty—I have the word of somebody in the Bible!
Thus in both divisions of the Western church the free spirit of humanity is shut out, and we are referred to an outward standard, not one within mankind. I ask the Catholic, "How do you know your church is infallible?" and the Protestant, "What is the proof of the Divinity and infallibleness of your Bible?" but neither has any valid argument to offer; each assumes the chief point on which all else depends, and puts a master on the neck of mankind. The inquirer is not to ask, "What is true—conformable to the instincts and reflections of human nature?" only, "What is ecclesiastical and of the church? or, What is Scriptural and of the Bible?" Thus the outside caprice of some man, often of some unknown man, is made to take precedence of the facts of the universe. God is postponed and a priest preferred.
What is yet worse, in both the Latin and the German church, much more stress is laid on the Christian theology than on the Christian religion. Natural piety, natural morality—the religion of human nature—is thought good ​ for nothing; stigmatized as "deism," "infidelity," which "saves nobody," "good to live with, not to die by." Religion is accessory, theology principal.
In the Christian theology there are doctrines, good and bad, much older than Jesus, things from him and his time, many from a later date. The Christian church was the residuary legatee of the institutions it slew, or which perished without such foreign aid. It retained many of the best things of Hebrew and heathen antiquity; one. thing it left out of its treasury—free individuality of spirit, freedom in philosophy, freedom in religion. Yet it was this which made the moralists, poets, and philosophers of the heathen institutions, the prophets and psalmists of the Hebrew institutions ; yes, it made Jesus and his apostles. The church kept the child's swaddling bands, the fictitious likeness of father and mother, the gossip of nurses, and the little cradle, but it shook out the live baby ; it kept the wonderful draught of fishes which toilsome mankind had caught, called it "miraculous," and then forbid all persons to cast net or angle in the great deep of humanity, whence it had been taken. Hereafter that ocean must be shunned as a dead sea ; and fishers therein must be held blasphemous, and burned with the fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
There is one great scheme of theology common to the Christian sects; it was gradually formed in the dark and middle ages, and contains both good and evil. It was a growth out of human nature, perhaps as unavoidable, under the circumstances, as the particular schemes of agriculture or politics of that time, coming as the feudal system, as alchemy, and astrology, and other experiments of man. Of course the Ecclesiastical Institutions are no more supernatural than the pattern of merchant-ships, or the constitution of the republic of San Marino. Mistakes in the form of religion—feelings, opinions, actions—are no more surprising than mistakes in the form of the family or the community; false ideas in theology not more astonishing than in philosophy or business—which are all attempts at progress, and advance by experiment. But these Ecclesiastical Institutions are forced on man as "Di​ vine," of "miraculous origin." The Catholic priest says, "The church is all glorious, not a spot or blemish on her," and "out of the church is no salvation." The Protestant minister says, "The Scriptures are all Divine, no human wrinkle in the Divine leaves, where inspiration yet flutters, and wherein revelation is written; out of the Bible there is no salvation! "It is easy to be mistaken; it is also not difficult to deceive others, at least to make the attempt. Is this innocent error, or pernicious deception? The clergy are the most learned body in Christendom; are they also the most stupid? Men will answer this question as they must. The church and the state are ruled by men tempted alike, perhaps equally honest. There is wicked legislation, wicked doctrinization—good also in both kinds.
These Ecclesiastical Institutions of Christendom contain much good; but their worst things rest on the same "Divine revelation," and claim the same "supernatural authority." The same "revelation" gives us God and the dreadful malignity of God; a little spot of heaven it gives us, and then crowds humanity down into its bottomless hell, roaring with that infernal sea's immeasurable taunt at our endless agony. The same fountain gives us a little brook of sweet fair water, enough for a household, and then drowns the world in a deluge of hell-fire.
A chain is no stronger than its weakest link; if the rest be of iron, and one joint only be of straw, when the weight is put on the chain snaps in its weakest part. With these notorious faults in it, the "miraculous communication from God," its "infallible revelation," the "authoritative rule," is good for nothing; its "hell" destroys its "heaven," and the malignant and foolish character it ascribes to God makes its testimony as to the existence of God utterly worthless. The chain which let down God to our sight breaks off at the link of devil. Allow me to take the chain to pieces, and use the good sound metal, either in its present form when thus serviceable, or as old iron to be heated afresh and wrought into new shapes for use or beauty, it is of great value. The links of sand and straw may go for what they are worth, the magazine of iron serves our purpose. But if we must use it as a chain, it is not only good for nothing, holding no weight, but still worse than no​ thing, failing when we rely on it most, and, beside that, falling upon our heads.
But what can stand against the spirit of mankind? Chain the wind! Let me see yon! It bloweth where it listeth. In the sixteenth century the free-thinkers of Europe, who were only the head of a column of doubt which reached across the dark ages, attacked the infallibility of the Romish church. Down went the outer wall, and through its wide breach all North Germany, Scandinavia, Anglo-Saxondom, with half Holland and Switzerland, marched forth to new fields. In vain did atheistic Rome let off her mock lightnings and stage thunders at Luther and Calvin; the Latin herd of bulls went down before the terrible charge of Teutonic horse, led by such champions as Gustavus and Cromwell. The whole camp of Christian theology was in confusion.
Other free-thinkers followed; the Socinians, with their coadjutors, attacked the Trinity. " God is one," said they, "not triple; Jesus is not Jehovah; the Son not the Father. God cannot be born, be a baby, a boy, a man, and then die. It is not in the Bible ; if it were, we would believe it; we renounce the Trinity "So there rose up the Unitarians—not very numerous, but powerful through their arguments and character. In turn the Trinitarians screamed their maledictions. "You are no followers of Jesus, not Christians; you have denied the Lord that bought you. God not die! Did not God the Father make bare his red right arm, and on Calvary stab through and kill his only begotten Son?' Without God manifested in Christ, we should not know any God at all. You are Atheists!" But a new breach was made in the mediaeval wall of Christendom, and other men marched forth. The whole citadel of theology was again in peril.
Then kind-hearted men, free-thinking further yet, said, "There can be no such thing as eternal damnation; God is not a devil, He is a Father; there is no future torment at all, or if any, it is correction in love, not revenge in hate. Listen to all these blessed beatitudes of Old Testament and New; eternal hell is not in the Bible: if it were we should believe it." A great outcry was made against these lovers of mankind. " What I give up hell; ​ our own eternal hell?" exclaimed the damnationists. "You have taken away our Lord, and we know not where you have laid Him ; there can be no religion if eternal torment do not scare depraved man out of his senses." Still this denial went on and multiplied, and a third great breach was made in the battled wall, while all the Ecclesiastical Institutions shook as hell was wrenched away from underneath that corner of the church.
These breaches cannot be filled up; the German Protestant goes not back to the "Infallible Roman church;" the Unitarian has consulted his "carnal reason," and no longer believes that the Eternal God once lay, newly born, a baby in the arms of his virgin mother, and was fed from her bosom; the Universalist returns no more to the "doctrine of devils," but refuses to worship a God who would damn even a New England stealer of men. Who can annul a fact? The charmed wall of Christian theology is cloven through in three places. Shall mankind build up the breach? It were as easy to reverse the motion of the great rivers of the continent, and make the Atlantic ascend the St Lawrence, climb up the steep of Niagara, and empty its vast volume into the lake of the woods.
But in the great body of the Christian church this old theology still prevails. The Catholics outnumber the Protestants as three to two, all the Celto-Romanic nations yet cleave to the Latin church, and are shut up in the clenched fist of the Pope. With the greater part of the Protestants hell and the Trinity are still treasured in their "creed." Even the Unitarians and Universalists cleave to "salvation by Christ," which means nothing in theology unless Christ be a God-man to save, and there be also "a dreadful fiery hell" of eternal duration, and wrath of God kept for ever, which we are to be saved from: they cleave to external authority, and will not credit the immortality of the soul, or the obligations of duty, unless they find it written in the Bible and confirmed by "miracles." So in theology they know no ultimate God but of paper, which they worship instead of the Infinite Cause and Providence of the universe, who confronts us ever, go we where we may. Accordingly they also accept the old "revelation" as the Ultima Thule of religion, ​ spurn the thought of the new inspiration good as the old, and count it blasphemy to suppose there ever can be another man as wise and religous as Jesus of Nazareth! So the littlest of sects must have their defenders of the faith to hoot out "Infidel," "Deist," and put a fence high as the Roman wall about the little, transient, thin-soiled summer garden of cooling fruits. In each sect of Protestsantism it is still a heresy to believe theologic truth because it is true, or to hope for progress beyond the Ecclesiastical Institutions of Christendom.
But a movement more important than that of Luther has long been going forward. Men deny all these five false ideas, and undermine the foundation of the Christian theology, the miraculous revelation itself. Here come the "Deists" of the seventeenth and other centuries, and the powerful mockers from various ages, who, though sitting in the seat of the scornful, have yet done mankind great service with the terrible arrows of their wit. Here also come the philosophers of many a wiser school, material and transcendental.
In the seventeenth century, in the age of Bacon, Milton, Newton, Locke, out of the midst of the uneducated peasantry of England, there rose up a man gifted with great genius of religion, its emotions and its ideas, and taught truths whose size and beauty amazed the thoughtful world. At one step George Fox went centuries in advance of Christendom. He felt that the Ecclesiastical Institutions of his time were not final; that "Christianity" itself is not God's last word and dying confession ; that the Spirit of God in us must not be driven out to let in the word of some other man, for "God in the soul is greater than all Bibles out of it. He did not comprehend his own great sentiments; yet here and there his emotion broke forth into noble doctrines. But the age was too early; he and his friends turned back to the Ecclesiastical Institutions of the time, and also worshipped the stocks and stones of an alleged revelation, grieving away the free spirit of God which comes like new morning to all risen souls—yea, to all the slumbering and such as will not wake. "Oppression maketh wise men mad," and the attractions of the ​ Christian theology may easily draw even a great man from the self-subsistency of pure human religion. It is
"The most difficult of tasks to keep Heights which the soul is competent to gain."
The succeeding Quakers were still more easily satisfied with the poor ideas which the Christian theology offered of God, of man, of their relation, of miraculous and finished inspiration, and salvation by another's blood; they contented themselves with making broad their phylacteries, with enlarging the borders of their garments, and being called of men "thee" and "thou." But while listening for the echo of footsteps taken thousands of years gone by, they heeded not the beauteous Presence then and there passing before them, and not far from each. No wonder their prophetic blossom fell idle, and they brought no fruit to perfection. But the rise of such men as John Woolman, Job Scott, Elias Hicks, and a few others, as well men as women, showed that the ashes which a Christian theology raked over Pox and Nayler, and Barclay and Penn, could not smother the seeds of fire which God planted in human nature, and with the fresh breath of inspiration quickens to new and fair religious life. How vain to worship an idol!
"Thou, Thou alone art everlasting, and the blessed spirits
Which thou inoludest as the sea her waves."
All along, in all the ages of populous mankind, there have risen up sons of the spirit who scorned the little theologies of Hebrew, or heathen, or Christian churches, left such farthing candles under the priest's bushel or the couch of a nun, and in the light of God's morning went forth amid the grass and the flowers of nature, catching the song of earliest birds, and, like the newly risen sun, serving and praising God by their free joyous life of daily duty. When shall we close the lists and seek truth no more? When humanity gives up the ghost. The loving of the maiden is beautiful and joyous as the wedlock of the bride. Noble German Luther said, "If God would stand before me, truth in his right hand, search for truth in the left, and ​ say, ’Choose, Martin, which thou wilt,’ I would bow me down at his left hand and say, 'Oh! Father, give me search after truth; though I wander and fall into many an error. I will journey ever forward and upward unto Thee!’"
Now all the sects in America share these false ideas, and rest them on a basis which they pretend is Divine. They know only an imperfect God, a depraved mankind, and an antagonistic relation between the two; no revelation but one miraculous, unnatural, and long since ended; no safety but the vicarious "Salvation by Christ!"
The function of the "Christian minister" is not to educate the mind and conscience, and heart and soul of the people; not to learn and teach absolute truth, justice, loveiness, and self-subsistent holiness, but to administer the alleged revelation—of the Bible or the church—and bend and twist "our fallen human nature" into the shape demanded by the Ecclesiastical Institutions : he must bow him down before the old inspiration, not also for himself win and receive the new. The thirty thousand Christian ministers of the United States do not aim to produce natural religion, natural morality in men, the largest development of manhood and womanhood, but to make them partakers of the vicarious salvation, to rid them of human nature, the "natural heart," and appease the wrath of God. Prayer is to humanize the Deity, not to elevate and develope man. Thus religion, the most powerful of all emotiens in man, is turned away from its natural function and disfigures our life; it smutches the face with cowardice and unwomanly terror, and makes us go stooping and feeble, with eyes which dare not look up, and hearts that quiver and quail at the name of eternity, or its God! Hence the ministers of Christianity are no more powerful for good works. Some of them are able men, educated at great cost, no class of men so bookish and academic; a few are devoted, self-denying men; the majority chose their calling with an unselfish love for it ; some of them would lay down their lives for mankind. But while they consider it is their function not to provide for men's bodies by teaching us how to live a natural life of industry, tern​ perance and thrift, full of strength, truth, and comeliness; not to educate men's minds, developing the intellectual power to know truth and beauty, and handsomely report and apply the same ; not to unfold the conscience so that we shall both know and k:eep the natural law which God enacts in the constitution of man; not to bring out the affections till we love each other in all the forms of human endearment—filial, connubial, parental, affiliated, friendly, and philanthropic; not to cultivate the soul so that we shall know the real God by heart—not merely trembling beneath a fabled Deity imported from some foreign consciousness and plied upon us—and taste, and see, and feel His infinite perfection, till we also partake of His excellence and become one with Him, inspired by his truth, justice, and love, communing with Him in all noble life, and having no fear, but serving with continual growth of our being to absolute love and absolute truth;—while they do none of these things, but as their chief and instantial function seek to administer what at best were only a foreign, old, and finished inspiration, if it could be even that; and communicate a salvation alleged to be wrought out by one who died two thousand years ago; while for ultimate authority they appeal, not to the spirit of God within me now, in my own mind and conscience, heart and soul, not even to that spirit outside of me in the green and transient beauty of this earthly spring, or the perennial loveliness of the heavens whose spring is eternal, but to an old revelation, impossible to verify, made, it is said, to men long since dead, of whom I know little, and that not wholly to their credit as teachers of truth, full of errors obvious not less than manifold; while they appeal to low motives in me, to mean and selfish fear, now bribing with heaven, now scaring with hell, bewildering history with capricious fable, and philosophy with shameful theologic myths, preaching up an imperfect God who hates and will damn all his creatures save a scanty few, they seldom the noblest—and thunder forth all this mad volley against a heart which they declare totally depraved, incapable of any good thing, fertile only of evil, how can they succeed in elevating mankind to the dignity of human nature? True, there are noble men in all the churches, noble ministers in every sect, but they work for a vain purpose, counting it their ​ business to "pacify God," who yet needs no appeasing; they would save men from the fabulous "wrath to come," not from the real evils of want, ignorance, vice, oppression, and abnormal conduct in all its thousand forms; they tell us to get rid of human nature, not to avoid the errors of human experiment, not to develope this noblest creation of God to its commensurate destination. They tell us that the manliest of all the Greek and Roman heroes, patriots, philosophers, and bards, the women whose beautiful souls bloomed into natural piety, the millions of common people faithful to all which God gave them, must "perish everlasting;" and even the magnanimous saints of the Hebrew or the Christian age were not such by their nature born in them, or their voluntary use of it, but by a "miracle of grace" wrought in their passive substance by the Almighty Artist; that character saves no man; only Christ can "redeem!" It is not large, self-reliant manhood which ministers ask to make us "Christians," but the acceptance of another's action in place of my own. You read of "conversions," thickly following in these days: generally it does not mean the education of the man, but how often only that he has learnt a new trick of whining, or of believing something which he cannot even credit when in full possession of himself! Jesus of Nazareth is one of the last men who could be "converted" to this "Christianity" of our times! What a heretic that great magnificent soul would be to our Ecclesiastical Institutions! A missionary of the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts writes from the Crimea: "The soldier is very childlike in some things; he has been so long accustomed to obey that he has not been allowed to form notions or have opinions, and thus he is in a fit state to receive the good news, the glad tidings of salvation; he receives it in simplicity." So in his highest condition the Christian is only a suckling on the miraculous bosom of the church! Must then the sons of the church be only continual babies?
No doubt the Ecclesiastical Institutions of Christendom are the greatest obstacle now in the way of man's progress, retarding and perverting the intellectual, moral, affectional, and religious development of the human race. Still, they are not able to destroy the instinct for progress, and in ​ America hold back the tide of improvement. While the Christian sects have been building up this dark theology of unreason, there has been a great growth of philosophy and religion. See what a forest of science and literature has sprung up outside of the churches, and in spite of the mildew of their breath.
All over Christendom thoughtful men have broken with the ecclesiastical traditions. They find there is no such, imperfect and dreadful God! no such totally depraved man as the Church pretends; no such antagonism between the Divine and human nature; no such miraculous revelation, or vicarious salvation; that there is no infallible church, nor infallible Bible; no Trinity, no incarnation, no eternal hell, no miracle; that the history of man's religious development is no more mysterious than the history of his agriculture or astronomy: nay, that all the great steps are forward and upward, this ghastly theology itself one of the manifold experiments of humanity, in our triumphant march—a stumble, but forward.
Some of these are philosophers—men of science, of metaphysics—who have profoundly studied the world of matter and of man, and become familiar with human history. Some are philanthropists; they labour for the oppressed and perishing; take the part of the laity against the priesthood; of the people against the tyrant; of woman against man, who holds her down by force; of the slave against his master; of him that suffers wrong against whoso does the wrong. They seek to spread knowledge, industry, temperance, riches, health, beauty, and long life, and purity, and every human virtue amongst all men. They would promote peace between nations, and found society on cooperative industry, not on mutual selfish antagonism.
All these men have broken with the Ecclesiastical Institutions, Catholic and Protestant. They ask not its heaven, nor tremble at its hell. There is a great body of thinking men in America and England, who have outgrown the mediaeval theology; they are not "in a fit state to receive the good news, the glad tidings of salvation," for they have been accustomed "to form notions and have opinions" of their own. Over these the church has lost its ancient power. Some of them wander away into speculative athe​ ism, disgusted with the very name of religion. Do you marvel at it? Remember what has been offered them in that name! Many stop this side of that extreme, but yet have no conscious religion. Full of pious feeling, rich in moral conduct, and in hope for mankind, they are religious without belief in God, and hopeful with no expectation of a future heaven.
I look with great pain on the men whom the Christian theology has driven away from religion; they are the confessors and martyrs of the church of the future. Saints of denial, their fidelity drove them forth from institutions which could not satisfy the thoughtful man. They found no rest, "in wandering mazes lost," They went on the forlorn hope of mankind, to storm the castle of despair; they perish in the ditch, crushed by the wall they overthrow. In a better age they would go first and foremost in building up the great temple of piety. Now they only prepare for its foundation, and never see its blessed walls; Simeons who die without the consolation! But how much more do I mourn over the less manly fate of such as accept these institutions, and are benumbed by the narcotics of the church, till all their manhood is paralyzed, and they he there, coffined in their pews, which rest on crumbling graves, stifled with the miasma thereof, swathed about with the mummy-cloths of a theology that is Egyptian in its darkness if not in age, and burthened with a torpor, profound, heavy, and similar to death, were it not visited with fear, that dreadful nightmare which haunts the church! It is better that doubt deprive us of sleep, rather than belief take all our life away. For what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world of theology, and lose the integrity of his own consciousness; or what shall a man get in exchange for his soul? The name "Christian;" the title "orthodox!"
I know ministers chide at this as "a material age:" Never was one so spiritual before. There was never so much action of the highest faculties in man—never so much wise thought, such science, such metaphysics, such history, such beautiful creations of intellectual magnificence. There was never so much morality—such keeping of the natural laws of God; never so much benevolence amongst men, nor so much piety—reverence for truth, ​ justice, love, and holiness; never so much love for the Infinite God. But this spiritual activity does not put its new wine in the old leathern bottles of the church. So the church thinks it fit only for the devil's sacrament! It builds no Pyramids, nor Parthenons, nor cathedrals of St Peter, "indulging" a hemisphere in purchased wickedness that it may pile up sandstone and marble in the name of God. It does not engage in a crusade against brother men in the name of Him whose early word was, "Love your neighbour as yourself," and his latest, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!" No colonies are founded in the name of religion, because the nations which swarm forth into new hives have conquered the oppressive church and now can enjoy their religion at home. The Puritan builds him his meeting-house in old England; the Quaker need not "bear his testimony" by leaving the grave of his mother; the Waldenses may fill all the valleys of the Alps, with none to molest or make them afraid. We exaggerate the religiousness of past times and underrate our own. The millions who went to the Holy Land in the Dark Ages, with the red cross on their shoulders, to fight the Saracen, had as little of true religion as the filibusters who would pillage Cuba and Mexico; or the mob who crowded to the funeral of Bill Poole in New York. Once ignorant men honestly affirmed the popular theology; now man enlightened denies it and spurns it away.
Reverence for God sends men to study nature, his undoubted Scriptures—the world of matter his Old Testament, the world of man his New. There was never such a profound and wide-spread love of truth, and search after it. Look at Germany and France, which lead in the world's science, literature, and art; look at England and America, following with our slower Saxon brain, our heavier and more material feet! See how in those perennial diagrams of fire men study the thought of God demonstrated in the geometric science of the sky, or in the deeper heaven of man's nature watch the course of those human stars for ever wheeling round the central orb, which is unseen though felt through all our history!
The religious spirit of this age shows itself in the attempt to found better political institutions, which shall in​ sure unity of action to millions, and yet destroy the personal freedom of no man. Look back a few hundred years,— what were all the six crusades to the American and French Revolutions—to the Year of Revolutions so recently passed by? What was the pretended discovery of the true cross, of the tomb of Jesus, of the lance which pierced his side, compared with the attempts to abolish slavery, war, pauperism, ignorance, drunkenness! One was the search for a piece of wood, or iron, or stone; the other an attempt to elevate man to the image of God. It was an act of piety to build the cathedrals of Europe. What is it to build up such communities of men as the new free States of America, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota? Are the mechanical inventions of this age to pass for nothing! Now the gospel of mind is preached to matter, material elements have heard the word with joy; and in this new pentecost, earth, air, fire, water, lightning, have received the Holy Ghost, and are baptized with thought; obedient to the heavenly vision, they become servants of the church of humanity, and are ministers to promote the true salvation of mankind—clothing the naked, giving bread to the poor, and education to the thoughtful and the heedless.
See what reform of laws goes on continually; what pains are taken to defend the most exposed classes of mankind. Down must fall the gallows—type of a malignant God; the Sun of Righteousness must shine into the dungeon; jails must no more be savage torture-chambers, but civil hospitals to heal the sickly man; crime must become amenable to correction which would bless, not subject only to vengeance which would but burn and kill. Drunkenness must end, and American democracy forges her sharpest, heaviest axe, grinds it to rough and dreadful edge, then smites it down upon that beast with seven ghastly heads, and seventy times as many ample-tined horns all red with murder;—drunkenness must die. Pauperism must lay off its rags—no longer sitting in the dirt of Dives' gate with no attendance save the dogs', unasked—but the science of the age shall heal the beggar of his poverty, which is tha destruction of the poor. The lame must walk, the public finding crutch; the blind must see with foreign eyes, germane not alien; the deaf must hear ​ with other sense which human science gives; and in his fingers the dumb man finds a tongue, and yet no miracle. In his right mind the lunatic sits clothed. The harlot, seduced by passion once, or scourged by want, must now be wooed back to comely womanhood once more; the nun, no longer in idle dreams worshipping the "Virgin Mother of God," reclaims these hard-entreated sisters of men, daughters and victims, the clean hand washing that so deeply polluted. Children derelict of their parents—wrecks of drunkenness, ignorance, and crime-must find fathers and mothers in the public lap. Nay, the poor fool—whom in "the ages of faith" kings and Popes mocked at, who, rigged with motley cap and bells, went a hideous jest, the companion of apes, in theologic and monarchic courts, and even in the humane Bible, was pointed at with dreadful hootings—in the new democracy must now be lifted up to the dignity of man. Even the abortions of humanity must be respected and beloved. Walls of partition fall away from between us; the patient philanthropist knows no race but the human, no class but of men. and women. The Turk must not be oppressed, though the unity of Christendom be broke to rescue him; and now the foremost nations of the Latin and the Teutonic church join hands to help the Mohammedan against the Christian of Russia. "The Jews are the slaves of the church," said St Thomas Aquinas, "which can dispose of their goods." Now the Jew must have the same rights as the Christian, for these depend on human nature itself. Wars must cease; the fetters fall from the limbs of the slave; if Christian theology chain him, the chain will drag down the unmanly church. The savage must be fed with the science of the civilized. Woman must be the equal of man, rejoicing in the same ecclesiastic, political, social, domestic, and individual rights, commensurate with her duties and her nature; and so the garden wherein God put the choicest human mould and planted the divinest seeds of heaven, long trodden under foot and made the commonshore of ambition and of lust, must now bring forth its natural flowers of humanity, whose fragrance is the breath of God, and their fruit for the healing of the nations.
Behold the great philanthropies of our time! But in ​ this work—the greatest work of the most noble age—the servants of the Ecclesiastical Institutions can do little in their professional capacity. As religious men, they may do much; as "theological ministers," how little! True, there are noble ministers, worthiest followers of Jesus of Nazareth—nay, leaders far in advance of that Son of God, in the nineteenth century venturing where he never trod, nor could not step so long ago—who engage in all these noble deeds of humanity. But they are heretics, really, if not all plain to see! The mass of ministers—what do they care for the bondage of the slave, the degraded position of woman, for the vices of the age, which cheat man of his birthright? They can quote theology to prove them all virtues. It is their function to "baptize" men, or babies rather, to "convert" them to the popular theology, admit them to the church, to a dispensation of wine and bread in the meeting-house, and bury their bodies when dead ; not to humanize and elevate them to great manhood. With those five false theological ideas, what can thirty thousand ministers do? What they do! I find no peculiar fault with them; I pity far more than I blame—for I know too well how ecclesiastical education blinds the eye with thick bandages of old prejudice, and then is called "teaching man to see with the Spirit." The ecclesiastical minister is to alter the disposition of God, not that of man. He is to deal with the "original sin" inherited from "Adam," not the actual offences against natural law which originate with you and me. He is to help a few men out of hell; it is not lust, drunkenness, gaming, violence, idleness, theft, murder—vices of passion; it is not pride, vanity, covetousness, ambition, deceit, cruelty, and lust for power, and all the other vices of calculation, which cast men down; they are damned for the taint of Adam, "the fault of our general human nature," not for our personal misconduct as Emily and James. Adam's sin is the Cerberus of the Christian mythology; there in hades he crouches, keenly scenting the "guilt" of the "unredeemed," and with pitiless baying hounds them off to hell. The ecclesiastical minister is to help express a few lean and hungry souls to heaven; but the ticket demanded at that slow-yielding gate is not the golden branch plucked from the tree of life, planted, indeed, by God, but watered, tended, hus​ banded by us, radiant with youthful flowers, and rich with manly fruit of every virtuous sort ; no, it is a certificate of "baptism," of "conversion" to the opinion of the Catholics or the Quakers, or other little sect, or that he is tattooed all over with some man's ancient whim; no healthy spot of natural skin left whole. Adamitic virtue is not welcome there—"salvation is by Christ." Not a sect in the Christian world proclaims "salvation" by character, by honest efforts to do a man's best; not one demands the moral development of all the faculties as the great work of life, and the service of God! Each sect is termagant to war against the fictitious sin of Adam; not one is strongly militant to fight against the incidental errors of our historic development, the great vices which lay waste the sons and daughters of men. They can compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and then teach him that there is "no higher law." "American slavery is a divine institution," and "the fugitive slave bill is worthy of the church of Christ." "According to their pasture so are they filled." Can you expect better work from such tools? Who could cut down the woods of Nebraska with an Indian axe of stone? What if you had only the industrial tools of the Pennsylvania red man three hundred years ago? How would your harvests look? Where would your cities shine?
I say there was never so much normal action of the higher faculties in man ; but there is no Ecclesiastical Institution which can organize and direct this action, or even encourage it. In the churches of America, Mr Polk and Mr Webster are counted better Christians than George Washington or Benjamin Franklin. No philanhropist ranks so high as the authors of the fugitive slave bill. Slavery is "orthodox," "Christian." Ay, is of the Christian theology! There is no popular theology, no science of religion, to go forth in advance of the age, with its great idea of God and of man, a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, leading us out of the house of bondage, through red seas and sandy deserts, to the land of promise. The Hebrew church, which brought Israel up out of Egypt, perished, in Jerusalem; the Buddhistic poorly feeds the half-civilized millions of Asia. The Mohammedan church, which once led the Shemites to such wide ​ victory, has twice been broken by the dreadful Teutonic arm, and now sees her crescent in its last quarter; its silver light is too feeble for nations to walk by on the path of science, letters, or noble manly life, and the morning comes on apace. The once powerful church, so sadly misnamed, which honours only the Christ of fiction, not yet the Jesus of fact, with her triple crown of nationalities—Greek, Latin, German—no longer sits the heir of all the ages, and the queen of civilization. Twice the ministers of this Ecclesiastical Institution have led the movements of the Western world. Once, when they felt the warm breath of that great Hebrew Peasant—a poor woman's child, cradled among the oxen at Bethlehem—and walking by the evening splendour reflected from his genius just gone down, all filled and inspired by the womanly comeliness and manly sublimity of his life, the apostles and martyrs—two by two, they wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in; hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted not, but went from one kingdom to another people, few in number and strangers in it, despised and rejected of men—they led the world with their austere piety and victorious confidence in God. Once again the Christian clergy, richly endowed, with studious men in their well-fed ranks, had a monopoly of superior education; they alone kept alive the torch of science, once lighted by that spark which Greek Prometheus had brought down from God; their garden alone escaped the barbaric flood, the new deluge, which so wasted all the world besides, and therein many a choice plant of ancient husbandry still grew, enriching its literary bloom with all the sweetness and mysterious meaning of ancient times; yea, new plants therein sprung up, by spontaneous generation from the all-quickening life of nature. Then the fathers and doctors—wide-browed, their tall heads worn with thought—they led the world; and as a symbol of their intellectual mastery, straightway sprang up new organizations of matter, the vast cathedrals of the Western world, those flowers of stone, the hanging gardens of the Latin Church, which still amaze the world, whereto the elements seemed moving 'neath the orphic impulse of creative mind. Then, too, came forth those priestly companies of monks and nuns—the master mind ​ new organized in mortal men, unarmed and armed the most—who tyrannized over tyrants, and ruled the world by hope and fear, with tragic witchery of thought.
But that Teutonic giant who smote the Roman state, and doubly smote Mohammed's power, has also broke the Latin church. For three hundred years no great and world-compelling thinker is her son. Now she is a widow. No other church assumes her ancient and imperial rank. The printing press has slain the Pope. Since Luther spoiled the ecclesiastic charm,—still more, since the American and French Eevolution wrenched in twain so many a yoke, the Christian church has ceased to lead the religious feelings and philosophic thoughts of men, which whoso rules, holding the heart and head of Christendom, perforce controls the civilization of mankind, and guides the column, and directs the march. The more than apostolic piety, which evangelizes its beatitudes of philanthropy to suffering mankind; the orphic intellect which far outgoes the mediaeval mind, and thinks into being railroads, factories, steam-ships, electric telegraphs, and crystal palaces of mechanic art, or builds up vast commonwealths of men—this is not "divine," or of theologic thought, but natural "carnal reason," " rebellious and profane"—the Christian religion, no doubt, but not Christian theology at all.
The Ecclesiastical Institutions of Christendom are now to enlightened Europe and America what the Hebrew theology was to the thoughtful Israelites, when "all Jerusalem went out" to John the Baptist; yea, what the classic mythology was in Borne and Athens when Paul of Tarsus set thitherward his manly feet. Now, as then, the more enlightened soothsayers dare not in public look each other in the face, lest the spontaneous laugh betray the
​ All the great world-sects have done service to mankind; each of the three still living—Buddhistic, Christian, Mohammedan—is of value still. Not a Christian sect but has yet some work to do—rears a little herb, else neglected, or picks a crumb which falls from mankind's table, whence even the fragments must be gathered up and nothing lost. The dreadful theology I have spoken of—nay, the five false ideas therein, though the most ghastly errors of human consciousness—have still been of service to the world. He maketh the wrath of man to praise Him! What grim laws of our fathers' day went before the humane legislation of their sons! What wars once reddened the land where now but peaceful cities stand ! Productive industry—the slave is father of that swarthy queen! Astrology and alchemy were once the sciences which filled the ablest heads of Europe. Without these there had been no Leibnitz and Newton, no Humboldt and La Place. Let us do no injustice to the wild-man, without garments for his limbs, or language for his baby thoughts. Abraham, in the mystic story, could faithfully offer up his son a human sacrifice to his conception of a blood-devouring deity. Let us honour ancient fidelity ; when mankind was a child he thought as a child! Nay, let us be patient with men whom defect of nature, or the perversion of their schooling, makes fit to think such sacrifice could ever be commanded by the God who made the world. Chide not the slow march of the red man in the woods, his captive wife bearing his burthens on her feeble back; mock not at his little cockle of bark which barely skims a stream, while our railroad train, on our iron tracks, a town of people in its arms, drives through the land with more than windy speed; or, while our ship, propelled by steam, can beara burthen of many a hundred tons, and front all the fierceness of the Atlantic sea. By the errors of our fathers, yea, brothers, let us, in all humility, be taught.
Allow all the service which the Christian church has done—nay, more, still does; yet her day of power is long since gone by. The open and professed atheism of a few scientific men, who think they think there is no God; the wide-spread doubt of thoughtful men, who are not certain of any conscious mind which plans the world and so insures the destination of mankind; the half-acknowledged dis​ trust of immortality; the American politician's scornful denial of any law of God above the lowest lusts of the profligate or the most cruel calculations of the madly ambitious, and the American ministers' cowardly assent thereto; the fact that all reformers who mean the people's good find readiest and longest-continued opposition from the church; the added fact that great masses of sober, thoughtful, moral and religous men and women—farmers, traders, mechanics, scholars too—have no faith in the popular theology, attend meeting only on sufferance, while the minister himself has no confidence in the "foolishness of his preaching," which is not weighty with argument, but only heavy with routine, knows not what to say, and abandons speech on all which touches daily life or a nation's work;—all this shows that the Ecclesiastical Institutions of Christendom do not, nay, cannot lead the religious man who could know God and love Him too ; cannot even scare the trader in wickedness who has set his heart on pleasure, office, gold, and power, nor fright the glutton from his beastly lust! The established church of France and England dares not rebuke a governmental sin. In the land of Luther the king is the minister, a German Pope ecclesiastic, all free speech flies even from his colleges, and dwells with " Atheists." The British Bishops are less religious than the "Manchester school of politicians" in the House of Commons; are ever at war with human nature. In 1850, and ever since, you saw how deep this rottenness had forced its way into the American Churches. Even the Senate was outdone in practical atheism; it was the pulpit would send its mother into bondage for ever!
But what then? Truth has not perished!
"The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by Seers or Sibyls told,
In groves of oak or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.
One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world has never lost."
No doubt these are times of great danger, and those who have always leaned on the crutch of authority will find it hard to stand when that crutch is broken. But the child ​ must sometime walk alone, or never be a man. It is by experiment that mankind learns to walk. Let us rejoice in the day when humanity assumes the manly dress! One day these Ecclesiastical Institutions must be left behind us, like so many others long since passed by; and man, through thousand perils, will fare forth to his land of promise, and thence to another yet more fair!
In briefest words, this is what we want: To develope the religous faculty with the same freedom as the intellectual in science, literature, and business. This must be done individually—each one by himself seeking inspiration from the soul of the world, the infinite father, infinite mother; and socially not less—men coming together to quicken each other as iron sharpeneth iron—for the genius of one man. one woman, will kindle ten, yea, ten million, and, at last, the world of men, as a single candle will light a thousand if tipped itself with fire. We must avoid the Roman error—not count a church infallible; the German error—not worship a book; the mistake of the whole Christian sect, who take Jesus of Nazareth for a finality—as Master, not Servant, sacrifice the development of the race to reverence one great lofty man, and worship as God what they should love as a brother, and as men should have long since outgrown. Thus only shall we get the good of the Catholic and Protestant churches, of the Hebrew and the Christian Bible; thus only learn the life of Jesus—come to God as he came, face to face, with no mediator, nor need of attorneys and go-betweens. Who shall plead to God for me? doth not he know? Though a prodigal, come back from riotous living, my substance spent, shoved away by swine from their husks which I would fain fill myself withal, shame-faced and sorrow-stained, conscious that I am not worthy to be called a son, asking only a servant's bread, I know that the Infinite Father sees me a great way off, and the Infinite Mother will fall on my neck, enfolding me to the all-bounteous bosom whence I came. Tea, my elder brothers shall take part in the joy over one sinner that repents, because the lost is found again and the dead come home alive!
These are the ideas which will be written on the banner of some future church, and borne as the orifiamme of ​ nations of progressive friends marching out of Egypt to lands of promise ever new:—There is a God of infinite perfection,—perfectly powerful, wise, just, loving, and holy—the perfect cause and providence of all that is; He creates from a perfect motive, of perfect material, for a perfect purpose, as a perfect means; the absolute religion is the service of this God by the normal use, discipline, and development of every limb of the body, every faculty of the spirit, and all power which we possess. We may make a paradise of peaceful industry, and find an immortal Eden, too.
Friends and brethren! this day is a marked one in my life. Fourteen years ago, the 19th of May, 1841, I preached an Ordination Sermon in Boston—"A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity," It was the first "Ordination Sermon" I ever preached; the first separate document I ever published with my own name. It cost me my reputation in the "Christian Church;" even the Unitarian ministers, who are themselves reckoned but the tail of heresy, denounced me as "no Christian," an " Infidel." They did what they could to effect my ruin —denied me all friendly intercourse, dropped me from committees of their liberal college, in public places refused my hand extended as before in friendly salutation; mocked at me in their solemn meetings; struck my name out of their Almanac,—the only Unitarian form of excommunication,—and in every journal, almost every pulpit, denounced the young man who thought the God who creates earth and heaven had never spoken miraculously in Hebrew words bidding Abraham kill his only son and burn him for a sacrifice, and that Jesus of Nazareth was not a finality in the historical development of mankind. Scarce a Protestant meeting-house in America, not a single theological newspaper, I think, but blew its trumpet with notes of alarm and denunciation. Behold! said they, behold a minister thinking for himself afresh on religion! actually thinking! and believing his thoughts! and telling his own convictions! He tells us God is not dead! that the Bible is not his last word; that he inspires men now as much as ever,—even more so. Surely this man is an "Infidel," a "Deist," nay, an "Atheist." Down with ​ him! Nay, one venerable orthodox minister, still living, published a letter calling on the authorities of the commonwealth to send this young "blasphemer" to the State's prison for three years, according to law in such case made and provided!
So went it with ministers—and at Boston. Some of them were honest—theology had blinded their eyes. But other men and women gathered about me, a few at first—some of them ministers—upheld my hands and strengthened my heart, and in their consciousness I saw reflected the facts of my own. Now there are thousands, and voices from distant lands, speaking with other tongues, come o'er the sea with words of lofty cheer. No man in his day of trial had ever heartier, nobler friends—women and men.
Since that, my first attempt, I have had no part in any such ecclesiastical ceremony for fourteen years. Now you, all strangers to my voice, have asked me to come more than three hundred miles to rejoice with progressive friends in the first opening of this new commodious house. The lines have fallen to you in pleasant places. May the spirit of God filling houses made with hands, and transcending the heaven of heavens, dwell with you and bless you for ever and ever. May you
"——— aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
All strength, all terror, single or in bands,
That ever was pat forth in personal form;
Jehovah—with his thunder, and the choir
Of shouting angels, and the empyreal thrones—
Them pass you unalarmed. Not chaos, not
The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,
Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out
By help of dreams, can breed such hopes and awe
As fall upon us often when we look
Into our minds—into the mind of man."
"Beauty—a living presence of the earth
Surpassing the most fair ideal forms
Which craft of delicate spirits hath composed
From earth's materials—waits upon your steps;
Pitches your tents before you as you move,
An hourly neighbour. Paradise, and groves
Elysian, fortunate fields—like those of old
Sought in th’ Atlantic main—why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.
—I, lone before the blissful hour arrives,
"Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal Terse
Of this great consummation; and by words
Which speak of nothing more than what we are,
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep
Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain
To noble raptures."
"May your life
Express the image of a better time,
More wise desires and simpler manners; nurse
Your heart in genuine freedom:—all pure thoughts
Be with you; so shall your unfailing love
Guide, and support, and cheer you to the end."
What an admirable opportunity to build up new Ecclesiastical Institutions—with the idea of the infinite perfection of God, and absolute religion, the natural service of the actual God, normal life the sacrament ! Here is complete freedom to think as we will, and build our human fabric never so high : no law of man forbids. How intelligent are the men of all these Northern States; the women the best instructed in the world. What is elsewhere not common, temperance and industry, the body's piety, insures us bread. No foreign foe affrights; at home no tyrant sucks the nation's strength and lies a night-mare on her breast. And how firm are the wide foundations of the democratic commonwealth! How swiftly riches accumulate! What material beauty adorns the affluent land. The wind is not freer than the mind to think, and speak with iron lips, and lightning for its tongue. There are five-and-twenty millions of men, one-fortieth of the world's great family, cradled in a single nest. Oh that there were a church to brood them with not unworthy wings, warm them with sentiments of love and trust in God, feed them with truth, and lead them forth a joyous flock to occupy the land with blessed human life.
What opportunities—and what a waste of them! Has any nation more deserved rebuke? A democracy, and every eighth man a slave! Jesus the God of the church, and not a sect that dares call slavery a sin! The most prominent sects defending it as "patriarchal," even "Christian." Shame on us; the actual Jesus of history we Have forgot, worshipping only the fictitious Christ, not Hebrew Mary's Son! There are thirty thousand ministers ​ in the land; what if they all preached natural religion —piety, morality,—and natural theology, the philosophy of that religion I What a world it would soon become! There are more than forty thousand congregations in the one-and- thirty States; what if they all were penetrated with the idea of God's infinite perfection—his perfect power, wisdom, justice, holiness, and love; sought normal inspiration from the soul of all, in whom we live, and move, and have our being; who lives, and moves, and has his being in the world of matter and of mind, yet far transcending both—and served Him by aspirations after great, magnanimous, and manly life! One day it will be so—and these great truths will, like the early light, move around the world waking a morning psalm of beauty in the material heaven above and earth beneath; and from all animated things, and chief of all from spiritual man, persuading forth a conscious hymn of adoration, thanks, and trust, and love, wherein, with well-accordant voice, island shall call to island, and continent respond to continent, and mortal with the immortal go quiring on the eternal and aspiring harmony!
"Nearer, my God, to Thee!
Nearer to Thee !
E'en though it he
A cross that raiseth me,
Still all my song shall be,—
Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee!"
* ↑ Some of the thoughts of this discourse may be found elaborated more fully in a volume of "Sermons of Theism, Atheism, and the Popular Theology. Boston, 1863, voL i, 12mo.
* ↑ See Rev. ix. 14—18, and xiv. 18—20.