Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/289

242, and then ask, Have the Evangelists overrated him? We can learn but few facts about Jesus; but measure him by the shadow he has cast into the world; no, by the light he has shed upon it, not by things in which Hercules was his equal, and Vishnu his superior. Shall we be told, Such a man never lived; the whole story is a lie? Suppose that Plato and Newton never lived; that their story is a lie. But who did their works, and thought their thought? It takes a Newton to forge a Newton. What man could have fabricated a Jesus? None but a Jesus.

doctrine of the infallible inspiration of the Scriptures has greater power with Christians at this day than in Paul's time. In the first ages of Christianity each apostle was superior to the Old Testament. There were no Scriptures to rely on, for the New Testament was not written, and the Old Testament was hostile. The Law stood in their way, a law of sin and death; the greatest prophets were inferior to John the Baptist, and the least in the Christian kingdom was greater than he; all before Jesus were “thieves and robbers” in comparison. Yet Christianity stood without the New Testament. It went forward without it; made converts and produced a wondrous change in the world. The Old Testament was the servant, not the master of the early Christians. Each church used what it saw fit. Some had the whole of the Old Testament; some but a part; others added the Apocrypha, for there was no settled canon “published by authority, and appointed to be read in churches.” So it