Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/199

186 for nothing; stigmatized as "deism," "infidelity," which "saves nobody," "good to live with, not to die by." Religion is accessory, theology principal. In the Christian theology there are doctrines, good and bad, much older than Jesus, things from him and his time, many from a later date. The Christian church was the residuary legatee of the institutions it slew, or which perished without such foreign aid. It retained many of the best things of Hebrew and heathen antiquity; one. thing it left out of its treasury—free individuality of spirit, freedom in philosophy, freedom in religion. Yet it was this which made the moralists, poets, and philosophers of the heathen institutions, the prophets and psalmists of the Hebrew institutions ; yes, it made Jesus and his apostles. The church kept the child's swaddling bands, the fictitious likeness of father and mother, the gossip of nurses, and the little cradle, but it shook out the live baby ; it kept the wonderful draught of fishes which toilsome mankind had caught, called it "miraculous," and then forbid all persons to cast net or angle in the great deep of humanity, whence it had been taken. Hereafter that ocean must be shunned as a dead sea ; and fishers therein must be held blasphemous, and burned with the fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

There is one great scheme of theology common to the Christian sects; it was gradually formed in the dark and middle ages, and contains both good and evil. It was a growth out of human nature, perhaps as unavoidable, under the circumstances, as the particular schemes of agriculture or politics of that time, coming as the feudal system, as alchemy, and astrology, and other experiments of man. Of course the Ecclesiastical Institutions are no more supernatural than the pattern of merchant-ships, or the constitution of the republic of San Marino. Mistakes in the form of religion—feelings, opinions, actions—are no more surprising than mistakes in the form of the family or the community; false ideas in theology not more astonishing than in philosophy or business—which are all attempts at progress, and advance by experiment. But these Ecclesiastical Institutions are forced on man as "Di-