Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/19

xx which comes pure from the Sun of Truth is refracted as it enters the atmosphere of our thoughts, and receives from it colours of all kinds—doubly refracted when it is reproduced in human language. There is somewhat of Divine and somewhat of human in the noblest thoughts and words of man. As God aids him morally by His grace, and yet never makes him impeccable, so He aids him intellectually by inspiration, yet never makes him infallible. Thus all the limitations and errors of the Bible are explained without either destroying its value or forcing us to do violence to reason and our moral instincts; they are recognized as the human element which inevitably blended with the Divine. And thus also is it explained how he, who of all the human race most perfectly fulfilled the conditions under which inspiration is granted to man; he, the best beloved of all the sons of God, whose coming was to the life of humanity what regeneration is to the life of the individual, may have erred concerning many things, concerning demoniacs, and the end of the world, and the prophecies he connected with himself, and yet may have spoken, on the Mount of Olives and by the well-side of Samaria, the deepest truths God ever taught to His creatures; lessons as immediately Divine as any voice of thunder from the sky could have proclaimed.

Fifthly, From the universality of Inspiration, Parker deduced the corollary of the trustworthiness of all facts of consciousness, which can be shown to be common to the human race under normal conditions of development. Such truths are necessarily given to the consciousness by Divine aid, they are written on the soul of man by that hand which writes no falsehood.

Thus, our Moral Intuitions are Divine. They reveal to us the immutable and eternal laws which are resumed in the righteous will of God, and which He has taught to His rational creatures, that through voluntary obedience to them we may attain to the highest end of our being, even an eternal approach to holiness and to Himself.

And the idea of an Immortal Life is Divine. It is a fact of consciousness given in the nature of man, and appearing under every circumstance of race and creed and age. We may trust to it as God's implanting, the promise of a world wherein our ideal of God's goodness, so often tried with