Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/293

246 the mass of men must always take Authority for Truth, not Truth for Authority.” But are they not true? If so the consequences are not ours; they belong to the Author of truth, who can manage his own affairs, without our meddling. Is the wrong way safer than the right? No doubt it was reckoned dangerous to abandon the worship of Diana, of the cross, the saints and their reliques; but the world stands, though “the image that fell down from Jupiter” is forgotten. If these doctrines be true, men need not fear they shall have no “standard of religious faith and practice.” Reason, Conscience, Heart, and Soul still remain; God's voice in Nature; His Word in Man. His Laws remain ever unchanged, though we set up our idols or pluck them down. We still have the same guide with Moses and David, Socrates and Zoroaster, Paul and John and Luther, Fenelon, Taylor, and Fox; yes, the same guide that led Jesus, the first-born of many brothers, in his steep and lonely pilgrimage.

This doctrine takes nothing from the Bible but its errors, which only weaken its strength; its truth remains, brilliant and burning with the light of life. It calls us away from each outward standard to the eternal truths of God; from the letter and the imperfect Scripture of the Word to the living Word itself. Then we see the true relation the Bible sustains to the soul; the cause of the real esteem in which it is held is seen to be in its moral and religious truths; their power and loveliness appear. These have had the greatest influence on the loftiest minds and the lowliest hearts for eighteen hundred years. How they have written themselves all over the world, deepest in the best of men! What greatness of soul has been found amid the fragrant leaves of the Bible, sufficient to lead men to embrace its truths, though at the expense of accepting tales which make the blood curdle!

Take the Bible for what is true in it, and the first chapter of Genesis is a grand hymn of creation, a worthy prelude of the sublime chants that follow; it sings this truth: The World was not always; is not the work of chance, but of the living God; all things are good, made to be blest. The writer—who, perhaps, never thought he was writing “an article of faith”—if he were a Jew, might superstitiously refer the Sabbath to the time of creation