Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/221

174 occasion of the duty, to make the effect precede the cause is an absurdity too great for modern divines. Besides, if it depends on Jesus, it is not eternally true; a religious doctrine that was not true and binding yesterday, may become a lie again by to-morrow; if not eternally true, it is no truth at all. Absolute truth is the same always and everywhere. Personal authority adds nothing to a mathematical demonstration; can it more to a moral intuition? Can authority alter the relation of things? A voice speaking from Heaven, and working more wonders than Æsop and the Saints, or Moses and the Sibyl, relate, cannot make it our duty to hate God, or Man; no such voice can add any new obligation to the law God wrote in us.

When it is said the doctrines of Religion, like the truth of Science, rest on their own authority, or that of unchanging God, they are then seen to stand on the highest and safest ground that is possible—the ground of absolute truth. Then if all the Evangelists and Apostles were liars; if Jesus were mistaken in a thousand things; if he were a hypocrite; yes, if he never lived, but the New Testament were a sheer forgery from end to end, these doctrines are just the same, absolute truth.

But, on the other hand, if these depend on the infallible authority of Jesus, then if he were mistaken in any one point his authority is gone in all; if the Evangelists were mistaken in any one point, we can never be certain we have the words of Jesus in a particular case, and then where is “historical Christianity?”

Now it is a most notorious fact, that the Apostles and Evangelists were greatly mistaken in some points. It is easy to show, if we have the exact words of Jesus, that he also was mistaken in some points of the greatest magnitude—in the character of God, the existence of the Devil, the eternal damnation of men, in the interpretation of the Old Testament, in the doctrine of demons, in the celebrated prediction of his second coming and the end of the world, within a few years. If Religion or Christianity rest on his authority, and that alone, it falls when the foundation falls, and that stands at the mercy of a schoolboy. If he is not faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who shall commit to him the true riches?