Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/309

262 Apostles Jesus has become in part deified, his personality confounded with the infinite God. Was it not because of the very vastness and beauty of soul that was in him? The private and peculiar doctrines of the early Christians appear in strange contrast with the gentle precepts of love to man and God, in which Jesus sums up the essentials of Religion. But, alas, what is arbitrary and peculiar in each form of worship, is of little value; the best things are the commonest, for no man can lay a new foundation, nor add to the old, more than the wood, hay, and stubble of his own folly. The great excellence of Jesus was in restoring natural Religion and Morality to their true place; an excellence which even the Apostles but poorly understood.

In their successors Christianity was a very different thing, and in the course of a few years,—alas, a very few,—it appeared in the mass of the Churches, an idle mummery; a collection of forms and superstitious rites. Heathenism and Judaism with all sorts of superstitious absurdities in their train, came into the Church. The first fifteen bishops of Jerusalem clung to the most obnoxious feature of Judaism. Christianity was the stalking-horse of ambition. A man stepped at once from the camp to the Bishop's mitre, and brought only the piety of the Roman Legion into the Church. The doctrine of many a Christian writer was less pure and beautiful than the faith of Seneca and Cicero, not to name Zoroaster, Pythagoras, and Socrates. After less than a century there was a distinction between clergy and laity. The former ere long became “Lords over God's heritage,” not “ensamples unto the flock.” They were masters of the doctrine; could bind and loose on earth and in heaven. The majority in a council bound the minority, and the voices of the clergy determined what was “the mind of the Lord.” Thus the clergy became the Church, and were set above Reason and Conscience in the individual man. They were chosen by