Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/338

Rh the right to interpret Scripture, reject tradition, relics, saints, and have nothing between them and Christ or God. It was right in demanding freedom of conscience for all men, up to the point of accepting the Scriptures. This was no vulgar merit, but one we little appreciate. The men who fight the battle for all souls, rarely get justice from the world.

Its capital vice was to limit the power of private inspiration, and, since there must be somewhere a standard external or within us, to make the Bible Master of the Soul. Theoretically, it narrowed the sources of religious truth, and instead of three, as the Catholics, it gave us but one; though practically it did more than the Catholics, for it brought men directly to one fountain of truth. Now if the Catholic had an undue reverence for the organized Church, so had the Protestant for the Scriptures. Both sought in the world of concrete things an infallible source and standard of moral and religious truth. There is none such out of human consciousness; neither in the Church, nor the Bible. Both must be idealized to support this pretension. Accordingly as the one party idealized the Church; assumed its divine Origin, its Infallibility, and the exclusive Immanence of God therein; so the other assumed the divine origin of the Scriptures, their Infallibility, and the exclusive Immanence of God in them. Has either party proved its point? Neither is capable of proof. As the Catholic maintained, in the very teeth of notorious facts, that there was no contradiction in the doctrines of the