# The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 01/Book 5/Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII.
THE FINAL ANSWER TO THE QUESTION.
Now then, if it be asked, what relation the Church sustains to the religious Element, the answer is plain: The Soul is greater than the Church. Religion, as Reason, is of God; the Absolute Religion, and therefore eternal, based on God alone; the Christian Churches, Catholic and Protestant, are of men, and therefore transient. Let them say their say; man is God’s child, and free of their tyranny; he must not accept their limitations, nor bow to their authority, but go on his glorious way. The Churches are a human affair quite as much as the State; ecclesiastical, like political institutions, are changeable, human, subject to the caprices of public opinion. The divine right of kings to bear away over the Body, and the divine right of the Churches to rule over the Soul, both rest on the same foundation—on a LIE.
The Christian Church, like Fetichism and Polytheism, like the State, has been projected out of man in his development and passage through the ages; its several phases correspond to Man's development and civilization, and are inseparable from it. They are the index of the condition of Man. They bear their justification in themselves. They could not have been but as they were. To censure or approve Catholicism, or Protestantism, is to censure or approve the state of the race which gave rise to these forms; to condemn Absolute Religion, called by whatever name, is to condemn both Man and God.
Jesus fell back on God, aiming to teach absolute Religion, absolute Morality; the truth its own authority, his ​works his witness. The early Christians fell back on the authority of Jesus; their successors, on the Bible, the work of the apostles and prophets; the next generation on the Church, the work of apostles and fathers. The world retreads this ground. Protestantism delivers us from the tyranny of the Church, and carries us back to the Bible. Biblical criticism frees us from the thraldom of the Scripture, and brings us to the authority of Jesus. Philosophical Spiritualism liberates us from all personal and finite authority, and restores us to God, the primeval fountain, whence the Church, the Scriptures, and Jesus have drawn all the water of life, wherewith they fill their urns. Thence, and thence only, shall mankind obtain Absolute Religion and spiritual well-being. Is this a retreat for mankind? No, it is progress without end. The race of men never before stood so high as now; with suffering, tears, and blood they have toiled, through barbarism and war, to their present height, and we see the world of promise opening upon our eye. But what is not behind is before us.
Institutions arise as they are needed, and fall when their work is done. Of these things nothing is fixed. Institutions are provisional, man only is final. Corporeal despotism is getting ended; will the spiritual tyranny last for ever? A will above our puny strength, marshals the race of men, using our freedom, virtue, folly, as instruments to one vast end—the harmonious development of Man. We see the art of God in the web of a spider, and the cell of a bee, but have not skill to discern it in the march of Man. We repine at the slowness of the future in coming, or the swiftness of the past in fleeing away; we sigh for the fabled “Millennium” to advance, or pray Time to restore us the Age of Gold. It avails nothing. We cannot hurry God, nor retard him. Old schools and new schools seem as men that stand on the shore of some Atlantic bay, and shout, to frighten back the tide, or urge it on. What boots their cry? Gently the sea swells under the moon, and, in the hour of God's appointment, the tranquil tide rolls in, to inlet and river, to lave the rocks, to bear on its bosom the ship of the merchant, the weeds of the sea. We complain, as our fathers; let us rather rejoice, for ​questions less weighty than these have in other ages been disposed of only with the point of the sword, and the thunder of cannon—put off, not settled.
If the opinions advanced in this Discourse be correct, then Religion is above all institutions, and can never fail; they shall perish, but Religion endure; they shall wax old as a garment; they shall be changed, and the places that knew them shall know them no more for ever; but Religion is ever the same, and its years shall have no end.