Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/203

190 spurn the thought of the new inspiration good as the old, and count it blasphemy to suppose there ever can be another man as wise and religous as Jesus of Nazareth! So the littlest of sects must have their defenders of the faith to hoot out "Infidel," "Deist," and put a fence high as the Roman wall about the little, transient, thin-soiled summer garden of cooling fruits. In each sect of Protestsantism it is still a heresy to believe theologic truth because it is true, or to hope for progress beyond the Ecclesiastical Institutions of Christendom.

But a movement more important than that of Luther has long been going forward. Men deny all these five false ideas, and undermine the foundation of the Christian theology, the miraculous revelation itself. Here come the "Deists" of the seventeenth and other centuries, and the powerful mockers from various ages, who, though sitting in the seat of the scornful, have yet done mankind great service with the terrible arrows of their wit. Here also come the philosophers of many a wiser school, material and transcendental.

In the seventeenth century, in the age of Bacon, Milton, Newton, Locke, out of the midst of the uneducated peasantry of England, there rose up a man gifted with great genius of religion, its emotions and its ideas, and taught truths whose size and beauty amazed the thoughtful world. At one step George Fox went centuries in advance of Christendom. He felt that the Ecclesiastical Institutions of his time were not final; that "Christianity" itself is not God's last word and dying confession ; that the Spirit of God in us must not be driven out to let in the word of some other man, for "God in the soul is greater than all Bibles out of it. He did not comprehend his own great sentiments; yet here and there his emotion broke forth into noble doctrines. But the age was too early; he and his friends turned back to the Ecclesiastical Institutions of the time, and also worshipped the stocks and stones of an alleged revelation, grieving away the free spirit of God which comes like new morning to all risen souls—yea, to all the slumbering and such as will not wake. "Oppression maketh wise men mad," and the attractions of the