Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/307

260 The New Testament was not written, and the Old Testament was but the shadow of good things to come, and since they had come, the children of the free woman were not to sit in the shadow, but to stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ had made them free. Man, the heir of all things, long time kept under task-masters and governors, had now come of age and taken possession of his birthright. The decision of a majority of delegates assembled in a council, bound only themselves.

Then the body of men and women worshipping in any one place was subject neither to its own officers, nor to the Church at large; nor to the Scriptures of the Old or the New Testament. No man on earth, no organization, no book was master of the Soul. Each Church made out its canon of Scripture as well as it could. Some of our canonical writings were excluded, and apocryphal writings used in their stead. Indeed, respecting this matter of Scripture, there has never been a uniform canon among all Christians. The Bible of the Latin differs from that of the Greek Church, and contains thirteen books the more. The Catholic differs from the Protestant; the early Syrians from their contemporaries; the Abyssinians from all other churches, it seems. Ebionites would not receive the beginning of Matthew and Luke; the Marcionites had a Gospel of their own. The Socinians, and perhaps others, left off the whole of the Old Testament, or counted it unnecessary. The followers of Swedenborg do not find a spiritual sense in all the books of the canon. Critics yearly make inroads upon the canon, striking out whole books or obnoxious passages, as not genuine. In the first ages of Christianity, the Bible was a subordinate thing. In modern times it has been made a vehicle to carry any doctrine the expositor sees fit to interpret into it. The first preachers of Christianity fell back on the authority of