Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/260

Rh The Spiritualists say—"The Bible is not a finality; it is no man's master, it is every man's servant. We, as well as the old prophets, can have communion with the departed. Christ reveals himself directly to us, as much as to Paul and Silas, Peter and James." Now, in all these cases, there was a new idea; not always a true one, but one which stirred men's souls and called forth religious emotions. What energy did religious truths give the followers of Jesus! What power there was in the early Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, Methodists, mixed with folly! Of course you expect that in all religious movements. What a spread have the doctrines of Universalists and Unitarians had in eighty years! In 1778, I think there were not ten thousand men in all America who believed the distinctive doctrine of Unitarians and Universalists—the ultimate salvation of all men. Now, how wide is the doctrine spread! How rapidly Spiritualism has gone abroad! yet it has no great man in its ranks, not a philosopher, not a scholar.

When a great religious idea comes new to any man, what enthusiasm it stirs us to! The followers of Jesus did not comprehend his glorious gospel of piety and morality; they thought more of the man than of his doctrine, his life. They made him a God. "Salvation by Christ" was their creed. The idea was new ; and though it was false, it was yet a great improvement over Hebraism and heathenism of that time. It made a new organization of its own, which covered all Europe with churches. But the vigorous life which once dwelt in the soil of Christendom, and threw up that ecclesiastical flora, and made those handsome shapes of stone fragrant with the beauty of devotion, it is now all gone. The fossil remains of that religious vegetation tell how mighty the life must have been. What was the state's king before the church's bishop? The Pope put his foot on the neck of emperors, for he had the religion of Christendom to back him. It is not so now, even in Europe. There is no more new religious life in Saint Peter's church at Rome, than in the pyramids of Egypt. Unburied dead men are in one, buried dead men in the other. So far as new thought is concerned, the Pope is only a mummy.

We want a revival of religion in the American church