Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/193

180 normal passivity of their various human faculties; and are, accordingly, of Divine origin, not at all amenable to mankind. They are foreign plants miraculously brought from heaven and set out in our niggardly human soil. Inspiration takes place in this manner: the Spirit of God takes transient or continuous possession of a special person and acts through him; so the action is God's, and not man's—God the artist, man the tool. The doctrines thus miraculously communicated are infallible and authoritative—the standard measure of religion and morality. They are also a finality—when the revelation is once ended, nothing is ever to be added thereto; nought taken away. Revelation to one man is binding on all: thus words uttered by a half-civilized Hebrew, many centuries ago, in a state of ecstasy, or dream, or fit of wrath, must now be taken for the infallible oracles of God, by a man born with the highest genius and furnished with the most ample culture which the human race can bestow. He must accept every doctrine of revelation, though in direct variance with the noblest instincts of human nature and the demonstrations of human science. These doctrines of revelation, thus actively communicated by God and passively received by some man, are to be accounted as the primitive source of theological ideas—the fountain of all our knowledge of God and what pertains to religion; human reflection and imagination may only develope, but must not transcend, what lies latent in these seeds of knowledge!

V. .—In consequence of the misstep and "fall" of Adam, God is permanently angry with the human race and inclined to damn all men to eternal torment. But His wrath has been somewhat mitigated, appeased and diverted from certain persons in this manner: the Divine Being is composed of three undivided personalities, who are equal in all respects. The second person—called the Son, though eternal and self-subsisted, as much as the first person, the Father—by His own will and consent becomes a man, "incarnated" in Jesus of Nazareth, "the only begotten Son of God," "born of a virgin," with no other human parent. He takes on himself all the wrath which God the Father felt for mankind, is crucified, and thus one undivided third part of the un-