Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/336

Rh is based on the assumption that God inspires that Church, miraculously and exclusively. This assumption is false. Though the oldest organization in the world, it has no right over the soul of man.

distinctive idea of Protestantism is this: the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the direct Word of God, and therefore the only Infallible Rule of religious Faith and Practice. It logically denied that an inspired man was needed to stand between mankind and the inspired Word. Each man must consult the Scriptures for himself; expound them for himself, by the common rules of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Each man, therefore, must have freedom of conscience up to this point, but no further. God was immanent in the Scriptures; not in the Church. The ecclesiastical tradition was no better than other traditions. It might, or it might not, be true. The Catholic Church had no miraculous inspiration.

Now it was a great step for the human race to make this assertion in the sixteenth century; it demanded no little manhood to do so at that time. Where were the men who had made it in the sixth, and all subsequent centuries?