Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/184

Rh no longer swallows down; these are the potsherds and arrow-heads which mark the track of mankind. Half the weeds of our fields were brought here as herbs indispensable to man.

In an institution the chief thing to look at is the idea it represents—the primordial thought; for that is the human mould in which the human substance of the institution is cast, and as the sheep are filled "according to their pasture," so the institution is like the idea which controls its shape. In thought you melt away all the matter of the solar system, conceiving of the sun and planets as mere mathematic points of force, and by this abstraction you can easier understand the mechanism of the heavens. In like manner, from institutions you may dissolve away the men who form them or are formed thereby, and consider only the ideas they represent, and by this abstraction the easier and better understand the mechanism of humanity.

In all nations above the mere naked wild man, you find sentiments, ideas, and actions, which have come from the religious element in human nature. Let the word religion stand here for the service and worship which man pays to his conception of God, whatever that may be. Theology is the science of religion. The intellect, reflecting on facts of religious consciousness, or on observations thereof in others, produces theology, just as it produces science from facts of consciousness and from facts of observation in the material world. The ideas which men form on what pertains to religion get organized into peculiar forms. Let me call them Ecclesiastical Institutions. They are different in the various nations, and vary in the same nation with its condition and culture. For, as the products of vegetation are not the same in any two zones, or countries, but follow the geographical peculiarities of climate, position, soil, and the like, so the Ecclesiastical Institutions—a product of the religious element—in form arid substance depend upon the ethnographic peculiarities of the race, the tribe, and nation, and vary with the degree of civilization and general culture. So the theological ideas of various nations, with the Ecclesiastical Institutions thence arising, differ as much as the Faunas and Floras of various countries.