Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/185

172 These Ecclesiastical Institutions, including therein all the emotions, ideas, and actions they embody, are of human origin. They are the contrivances which man makes for his purpose, his machinery of religion; the substance and the form are alike human. But as the object of religious reverence is Divine, not human, so it comes to be alleged that these institutions came down straightway from God. Astronomy deals with thp stars, and navigation with the deep: shall it then be said that Newton's Principia and Blunt's Coast Pilot came miraculous, the one from the heavens and the other from the sea? It were not more absurd. It does not appear that any foreign element of thought has been added to man's consciousness since the first creation. There is perpetual development from within, no importation from another sphere. As the world of material nature was fashioned as a perfect means for a perfect purpose, so the world of human nature is equally adequate for its Creator's design, neither getting nor needing additions from any foreign source. All that is in human consciousness originated there—from man's contact with his surroundings, and from himself.

There is one great idea common to all Ecclesiastical Institutions: the idea of God, the Divine above the human. All nations, above the wild man, agree in this point—There is a God; but differ in the character and conduct they ascribe to him. They agree as to his being, and differ as to his being this or that. For, as the plants of Nova Zembla differ from those of Sumatra, not less do the theological ideas of the savage differ from those of the civilized and enlightened. There are zones of religious as of material vegetation, arctic and tropical.

In Ecclesiastical Institutions there is something which is general, human, and belongs to all forms of religion coming from nations in that stage of development; and also something else peculiar to the particular people. So all men agree in what makes them men, but differ in what makes one John and the other James. In the last four or five thousand years there have been seven great forms or religion, or Ecclesiastical Institutions, in the world,—the Vedantic, Old Indian of South Asia; the Hebrew; the