Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/279

266 that God will damn all babies unbaptized and dying newly born, and if you could beguile them into honest speech, they would tell you "It rests on the authority of some one who died many years ago; we do not know who said it, nor what authority he had for saying it."

So it is with each of these other doctrines—the incarnation of God in a miraculous baby, the death of God by crucifixion, the resurrection of the dead God; the atonement, God the Son appeasing God the Father, this one undivided third part of the Trinity appeasing the two other undivided third parts. There is nothing which can be called circumstantial or personal evidence for these things; they all rest on the said so of somebody who knew no better than we; who took his dreams of the night or his whimseys of the day, for the facts of the universe.

In the Catholic church you will be told of the miraculous immaculate conception of Mary, the mother of God, of the miracles of St Valentine, to whom this day is consecrated, of St Dennis, who had his head cut off, and walked home with it under his arm. All this rests on the same sort of evidence as these seven dogmas just named; on the "said so" of somebody who knew nothing about it. There is no more reason for believing the miraculous birth of Jesus, the "Son of God," than of Mary the "mother of God," or of Anna, the "mother of God's mother," "the grandmother of God;" the whole rests on nothing. The Catholic church says that you must believe in the infallible Pope, and do the works which the church commands, and you shall find life everlasting; else you shall find hell everlasting. There is as much reason for that as there is for the Protestant mode of salvation; there is none at all for either.

This method leads to monstrous evils. To assume that there was such a communication from God, to submit man's highest faculties to such outside authority, in the long run, always degrades these faculties, and leads men in God's name to despise the very highest gifts He ever gave to man. The odious doctrines thus deduced drive some men to utter irreligion, even to atheism. All the way from Greek Epicurus to German Feuerbach, it is the follies taught in the name of God that have driven men to atheism. But speculative atheism is always exceptional,