the Perfect Religion which is to follow. Modern Christians love to deny that there are points of agreement between Christianity and its predecessors. The early apologists took just the opposite course.
1. The religious teachings of Jesus have this chief
excellence, they allow men to advance indefinitely beyond
him. He does not foreclose human consciousness against
the income of new truth, nor make any one fact of human
history a bar to the development of human nature. I do
not find that he taught his doctrines either as a Finality,
or as one of many steps in the progressive Development
of mankind: he gives no opinion. The author of the
fourth Gospel makes him tell his disciples that he had
other things to make known; that the Comforter would
teach them all things, and they should do greater works
than he. Paul, professing to receive new revelation from
the immortal Jesus, revolutionizes the doctrines of the
historical person; and notwithstanding the profession of
“following Jesus”, as the sole authority, the Christian
Church has built up a “Scheme of Divinity” and a “Plan
of Salvation” as much at variance with the recorded words
of Jesus in the Synoptics, as repugnant to common sense.
No sect has practically taken the words of Jesus for a
finality, though each counts its own doctrine as the last
word of God.
Judaism and Mahometanism each sets out from the alleged words of one man, which are made the only measure of Truth for the whole human race. There can be no progress. The devotee of Judaism or Mahometanism must logically believe his form of Religion perpetual: so if a man teach what is hostile to it, he must be put to death, though his doctrine be true.
Whatever is consistent with Reason, Conscience, and the Religious Faculty, is consistent with the Christianity of Jesus, all else is hostile; whoever obeys these three oracles is essentially a Christian, though he lived ten thousand years before Jesus, or living now, does not own his name. Let men improve in Reason, Conscience, Heart, and Soul, in what most becomes a man—they outgrow each form of worship; they pass by all that rests on historical things, signs, wonders, miracles, all that does not rest on
