Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/366

Rh with divine hands build wiser than they know. When the scaffolding falls the temple will appear.

Now then, if it be asked, what relation the Church sustains to the religious Element, the answer is plain: The Soul is greater than the Church. Religion, as Reason, is of God; the Absolute Religion, and therefore eternal, based on God alone; the Christian Churches, Catholic and Protestant, are of men, and therefore transient. Let them say their say; man is God’s child, and free of their tyranny; he must not accept their limitations, nor bow to their authority, but go on his glorious way. The Churches are a human affair quite as much as the State; ecclesiastical, like political institutions, are changeable, human, subject to the caprices of public opinion. The divine right of kings to bear away over the Body, and the divine right of the Churches to rule over the Soul, both rest on the same foundation—on a.

The Christian Church, like Fetichism and Polytheism, like the State, has been projected out of man in his development and passage through the ages; its several phases correspond to Man's development and civilization, and are inseparable from it. They are the index of the condition of Man. They bear their justification in themselves. They could not have been but as they were. To censure or approve Catholicism, or Protestantism, is to censure or approve the state of the race which gave rise to these forms; to condemn Absolute Religion, called by whatever name, is to condemn both Man and God.

Jesus fell back on God, aiming to teach absolute Religion, absolute Morality; the truth its own authority, his