Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/183

136 spoke them; not that he spoke them because true. It relies entirely on past times; does not give us the Absolute Religion, as it exists in Man's nature, and the Ideas of the Almighty, only a historical mode of worship, as lived out here or there. It says the canon of Revelation is closed; God will no longer act on men as heretofore. We have come at the end of the feast; are born in the latter days and dotage of mankind, and can only get light by raking amid the ashes of the past, and blowing its brands, now almost extinct. It denies that God is present and active in all spirit as in all space—thus it denies that he is Infinite. In the miraculous documents it gives us an objective standard, “the only infallible rule of religious faith and practice.” These mediators are greater than the soul; the Bible the master of Reason, Conscience, and the Religious Sentiment. They stand in the place of God.

Men ask of this system: How do you know there is in Man nothing but the product of sensation, or miraculous tradition; that he cannot approach God except by miracle; that these mediators received truth miraculously; taught all truth; nothing but the truth; that you have their words pure and unmixed in your Scriptures; that God has no further revelation to make? The answer is:—We find it convenient to assume all this, and accordingly have banished Reason from the premises, for she asked troublesome questions. We condescend to no proof of the facts. You must take our word for that. Thus the main doctrines of the theory rest on assumptions; on no-facts.

This system represents the despair of Man groping after God. The religious Element acts, but is crippled by a philosophy poor and sensual. Is Man nothing but a combination of five senses, and a thinking machine to grind up and bolter sensations, and learn of God only by hearsay? The God of Supernaturalism is a God afar off; its Religion worn-out and second-hand. We cannot meet God face to face. In one respect it is worse than naturalism; that sets great value on the faculties of Man, which this depreciates and profanes. But all systems rest on a truth, or they could not be; this on a great truth, or it could not prevail widely. It admits a qualified immanence of God in Nature, and declares, also, that mankind is dependent on Him, for religious and moral truth as for all