know,—as a builder up of faith—that faith which will remain unshaken upon the rock of human nature itself, when time shall have levelled every edifice built on the shifting sands of tradition; it is thus that Theodore Parker claims to be heard.
A few brief words concerning his doctrines and his life may, perhaps, be useful, by enabling the reader hitherto unacquainted with his writings to apprehend their bearing more perfectly. These writings, however, are so clear and honest, and that noble life was so simple in its absolute devotion to its holy purpose, that small space will suffice to speak for both.
There are four bases logically possible for a religion,—a living inspired Head, an infallible Church, an authoritative Book, an individual Consciousness. Of these four, Parker chose the last, leaving such creeds as Mormonism and Lamaism on the first, Romanism on the second, Calvinism on the third, and scores of intermediate churches shifting illogically between all four. The reasons for his rejection of the first three bases of religion are set forth at length in his writings, as also for his reliance on the veracity of Consciousness, corroborated for the individual by the consciousness of the wise and good of all ages.[1]
Standing on this ground of Consciousness, he preached the great doctrine of Theism, the Absolute Goodness of God. Every man is conscious of revering and loving certain moral characteristics, and of hating and despising certain others. Here, then, we find the assurance that He who made us to feel such reverence on one side and such contempt on the other,
- ↑ It is, perhaps, needful to guard against the accusation so constantly reiterated against the adherents of Consciousness as a basis of religious faith, that they actually stand on the lessons of Christianity, while professedly disavowing their authority. The truth is, that the hypothesis of Darwin (whether true or false, as regards the genesis of animal species) very aptly represents the natural history of the various creeds of mankind. Each one rises out of another, which chronologically preceded it—the strongest and noblest types being the parents of offspring, which reproduce in still higher forms their special excellencies. He who would pretend in our day to stand free from all obligations to Christianity, would boast as absurdly as he who should deny his obligations to his parents, his ancestors, and all the antecedents of his family and nation. But, in like manner, he who thinks that St John could have written his Gospel without a Plato before him, or St Paul his Epistles without a Zeno, would think also that Newton might have written the Principia had no Pythagoras or Euclid preceded him. Consciousness, as a basis of theology, is strengthened, not discredited, by every evidence that the greatest saints and sages of all time have corroborated its truths. The highest philosophy asks no man to originate or invent the truths of theology, but only when such truths are presented to him in any mode, to possess the consciousness of their veracity.
