Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/321

274 point of fact. If God miraculously inspired Jesus to create a new religion, Peter, Paul, and John to preach it, and Matthew, Mark, and Luke to record the words and works of Christ and of the Christians, when did the miraculous inspiration cease? With the Apostles, or their successors; the direct, or the remote? Did it cease at all? It did not appear. Besides, how could the inspired works be interpreted except by men continually inspired; how could the Church, founded and built by miraculous action, be preserved by the ordinary use of man's powers? Were Jude and James inspired and Clement and Ambrose left with no open vision? Such a conclusion could not come from a comparison of their works. Did not Jesus promise to be with his Church to the end of the world? Here was the warrant for the assumptions of the Catholic party. So, with logical consistency, it claimed a perpetual, miraculous, and exclusive inspiration, on just as good ground as it allowed the claim of earlier men to the same inspiration; it made Tradition the master over the soul, on just the same pretension that the Bible is made the only certain rule of faith and practice. As the only interpreter of Scripture, the exclusive keeper of tradition, as the vicar of God, and alone inspired by Him, it stood between man on the one side, and the Bible, Antiquity, and God, on the other side. The Church was sacred, for God was immanent therein; the world profane, deserted of Deity.

The Church admits three sources of moral and religious truth, namely:—

1. The Scriptures of the Old and New Testament and Apocrypha. It declares these are good and wise, but ambiguous and obscure, and by themselves alone incomplete, not containing the whole of the doctrine, and requiring an inspired expositor to set forth their contents.

2. The unscriptural Tradition, oral and written. This is needed to supply what is left wanting through the imperfection of Scripture, and to teach the more recondite doctrines of Christianity, such as the Trinity, Redemption, the Authority of the Church, Purgatory, Intercession, the use of Confession, Penance, and the like, and also to explain the Scriptures themselves. But Tradition also is imperfect, ambiguous, full of apparent contradictions, and