Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 1 (of 3)Parker, Theodore
Religion
Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 1 (of 3)
Parker, Theodore
Sermons, American; Unitarianism
If Jesus be the model-man, then should a Christian church teach its
members to hold the same relation to God that Christ held; to be one
with Him; incarnations of God, as much and as far as Jesus was one with
God, and an incarnation thereof, a manifestation of God in the flesh.
It is Christian to receive all the truths of the Bible; all the truths
that are not in the Bible just as much. It is Christian also to reject
all the errors that come to us from without the Bible or from within the
Bible. The Christian man, or the Christian church, is to stop at no
man's limitation; at the limit of no book. God is not dead, nor even
asleep, but awake and alive as ever of old; He inspires men now no less
than beforetime; is ready to fill your mind, heart and soul with truth,
love, life, as to fill Moses and Jesus, and that on the same terms; for
inspiration comes by universal laws, and not by partial exceptions. Each
point of spirit, as each atom of space, is still bathed in the tides of
Deity. But all good men, all Christian men, all inspired men will be no
more alike than all wicked men. It is the same light which is blue in
the sky and golden in the sun. "All nature's difference makes all
nature's peace."
We can attain this relation to man and God only on condition that we are
free. If a church cannot allow freedom it were better not to allow
itself, but cease to be. Unity of purpose, with entire freedom for the
individual, should be the motto. It is only free men that can find the
truth, love the truth, live the truth. As much freedom as you shut out,
so much falsehood do you shut in. It is a poor thing to purchase unity
of church-action at the cost of individual freedom. The Catholic church
tried it, and you see what came thereof: science forsook it, calling it
a den of lies. Morality forsook it, as the mystery of iniquity, and
religion herself protested against it, as the mother of abominations.
The Protestant churches are trying the same thing, and see whither they
tend and what foes rise up against them,--Philosophy with its Bible of
nature, and Religion with its Bible of man, both the hand-writing of
God. The great problem of church and state is this: To produce unity of
action and yet leave individual freedom not disturbed; to balance into
harmonious proportions the mass and the man, the centripetal and
centrifugal powers, as, by God's wondrous, living mechanism, they are
balanced in the worlds above. In the state we have done this more wisely
than any nation heretofore. In the churches it remains yet to do. But
man is equal to all which God appoints for him. His desires are ever
proportionate to his duty and his destinies. The strong cry of the
nations for liberty, a craving as of hungry men for bread and water,
shows what liberty is worth, and what it is destined to do. Allow
freedom to think, and there will be truth; freedom to act, and we shall
have heroic works; freedom to live and be, and we shall have love to men
and love to God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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