Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/99

Rh personification thereof in man, has been a step forward in religious progress. The grossest fetichism is only the early shoot from the instinctive seed, one day to blossom into the idea of the Infinite God. The confusion of past and present mythologies is not only a witness to the confusion in the religious consciousness of men, but the outward expression helps me to understand the inward fact, and so to bring truth out of error. The religious history of mankind could not have been much different from what it has been; the margin for human caprice is not a very wide one. All mankind had the same process to pass through. The instinct of development in the human race is immensely strong, even irrepressible; checked here, in another place it puts out a limb. The life of mankind is continual growth. There is a special progress of the intellectual, moral, affectional, and religious faculties; so a general progress of man; with that a progress in the ideas which men form of God. Each step seems to us unavoidable and not to be dispensed with. Once unconscious reverence of the Divine was all man had attained to; next he reached the worship of the Deity in the form of material or animal nature; then personified in man. Let us not libel the human race: we are babies before we are men. "Live and learn" applies to mankind, as to Joseph and Jane.

You and I are born as far from pure religion as the first men, and have passed over the same ground which the human race has painfully trod, only mankind has been be- fore us, and made a road to travel on ; so we journey more swiftly; and in twenty or thirty years an ordinary man accomplishes what it took the human race five or six hundred generations to achieve. But hitherto the majority of Christians have not attained unity, or even concord, in their conception of the Deity. There is a God, a Christ, a Holy Ghost, and a Devil, with angels and saints, demons and damned; it takes all these to represent the popular ecclesiastical conception of the Deity; and a most heterogeneous mixture of contradictions and impossibilities do they make. The Deil is part of the popular Godhead. Here and there is a man conscious of God as Infinite; but such are only exceptional men, and accordingly disowned as heretics, condemned, but no longer burnt, as of old time.