Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/187

174 What fits must be kept, the rest cast off. For the Ecclesiastical Institutions, like all other human contrivances, are amenable to perpetual improvement, and must be made to represent the total development of the nation which accepts and retains them.

There are now three great Ecclesiastical Institutions which occupy the civilized and half-civilized parts of the world, the Buddhistic, the Christian, the Mahometan. These represent the three great world-sects into which the foremost nations are now divided. The Christian is made up of Hebrew, Zoroastrian, and classic elements; it contains also some things derived from Jesus of Nazareth, and many more from Paul of Tarsus, who systematized what Jesus begun; and yet others, added from various sources since his time.

There are two things which pass tinder the name of "Christianity." One is natural piety and morality—the love of God and the keeping of His commandments; I will here call this the. The other is a scheme of theological doctrines and opinions which from time to time have accumulated, and are now brought down to us with numerous ecclesiastical ceremonies; I will call this the Christian theology, though in many important matters it differs widely from the recorded doctrines and opinions of Jesus himself.

It is this theology which shapes the Ecclesiastical Institutions of Christendom; it is the idea whereof they are the embodiment, the substance to which they are the form. When priests and ministers speak of "Christianity" they commonly mean the "Christian theology," not the "Christian religion." Men who believe this theology and comply with its circumjacent ceremonies are called "Christians;" not such as have merely the "Christian religion," who are called only "amiable men," "deists," "infidels," and the like. To be "converted" is to accept this theology with its ceremonies. When it is said, "Christianity frees the slave, elevates woman, humanizes man, saves the soul," the meaning is that this is done by the Christian theology. Now to understand the good and ill of these institutions, their relation to the religious consciousness of the American people, and their consequent influence on our present con-