Our chief concern is with Mr. Parker as a theologian. He was a stranger to moderation in every form. Having conceived certain skeptical views, he knew no terms strong enough to condemn the whole evangelical scheme. His chief defects of style are abruptness and occasional vulgarity, which no man more regretted than their author in his calmer hours. But there can be no apology for his dealing with serious subjects in that vein of sarcasm which reminds us of the grossness of the coarser brood of infidels. An English critic, noticing this defect, says: "His vigor of style was deformed by a power of sarcasm, which often invested the most sacred subjects with caricature and vulgarity; a boundless malignity against supposed errors.... He equals Paine in vulgarity and Voltaire in sarcasm."[271]
Parker felt that a bold course must be taken or orthodoxy could not be made to yield its position. His biographer informs us that when he was less than seven years of age "he fell out with the doctrines of eternal damnation and a wrathful God."[272] In later life, when striving to find the sources of what he considered the evils of the popular theology, he fixed upon two common idols: "the Bible, which is only a record of men's words and works; and Jesus of Nazareth, a man who only lived divinely some centuries ago. The popular religion is wrong in that it tells man he is an outcast, that he is but a spurious issue of the devil, must not pray in his own name, is only sure of one thing—and that is damnation. Man is declared to be immortal, but it is such immortality as proves a curse instead of a blessing. In fact this whole orthodox theology rests on a lie."[273]
His positive faith is comprehended in his own term, "the Absolute Religion." God has created man with an intuitive religious element, the strongest and deepest in human nature, indestructible, and existing everywhere. Its legitimate action is to produce reverence, and ascends into trust, hope, and love, or descends into doubt, fear, and hate. Religion is not confined to one age, or people, or sect. It is the same thing in each man, "not a similar thing—but the same thing." Three forms of religion have existed, and each in turn has ruled the mind,—Fetichism, Polytheism, and Monotheism. The first can be distinctly traced in the mythical stories of Genesis, the second in pagan nations, and the third in these later times. Now, it is a very small matter in which one of these forms man has worshiped or may still worship. If he worship at all, he adores the true God, "the only God, whether he call on Brahma, Jehovah, Pan, or Lord, or by no name at all.... Many a swarthy Indian, who bowed to wood and stone; many a grim-faced Calmuck, who worships the great God of storms; many a Grecian peasant, who did homage to Phœbus-Apollo when the sun rose or went down; yes, many a savage, his hand smeared all over with human sacrifice, shall come from the east and the west, and sit down in the kingdom of God, with Moses and Zoroaster, with Socrates and Jesus,—while men who called daily on the only living God, who paid their tribute and bowed at the name of Christ, shall be cast out because they did no more."[274]
Christianity, with Parker, is not the absolute religion, because a better may be developed. The great difference between it and other religions is: first, in the point whence it sets out, other religions starting from something external and limited, but Christianity from the spirit of God in the soul of man speaking through reason, conscience, and the religious sentiment; second, it is not a system but a method of religion and life; and, third, its eminently practical nature. The Deity adored by many people is a pure fabrication, for superstition projects its own divinity, which of course will be after its own impure mould. Men call the phantom God, Moloch, or Jehovah, and then attempt to please the capricious being whom they have conjured up. The true idea of God is his infinite presence in each point of space; this immanence in matter is the basis of his influence; this imposition of a law is the measure of God's relation to matter; and the action of the law is therefore mechanical, not voluntary or self-conscious.
The Bible, according to the same method of argumentation, is as much a human book as the Principia of Newton. Some things in it are true, but no reasonable man can accept others. It is full of contradictions; "there are poems which men take as histories; prophecies which have not been and never will be fulfilled; stories of miracles that never happened; stories which make God a man of war, cruel, rapacious, revengeful, hateful, and not to be trusted. We find amatory songs, selfish proverbs, skeptical discourses, and the most awful imprecations human fancy ever clothed in speech." The minds of the writers of the Old Testament were not decided in favor of the exclusive existence of Jehovah, and all the early books betray more of a polytheistic belief than we find in the prophets. The legendary and mythical writings of the Hebrews prove unmistakably that man was first created in the lowest savage life; that his religion was the rudest worship of nature; and that his morality was that of the cannibal. All the civilized races have risen through various forms of developing faith before reaching refinement and true religion. We do not know who are the writers of most of the Scriptural books. Their records are at variance with science. The account of Jehovah's determination that the carcasses of Israel should fall in the wilderness because of disobedience, is a "savage story of some oriental who attributed a blood-thirsty character to his God, and made a deity in his own image, and it is a striking remnant of barbarism that has passed away, not destitute of dramatic interest; not without its melancholy moral."[275]
The prophets are claimed to have written nothing in general above the reach of human faculties. The whole of the Old Testament is only a phantom of superstition to scare us in our sleep.[276] The statements of the evangelists have a very low degree of historical credibility. Miracles are not impossible, because God is omnipotent; but our main difficulty is, that we cannot believe the accounts descriptive of them. The testimony and not the miracle is at fault. Inspiration is not at all peculiar to the Scriptures. All nations have had their inspiration; this is a natural result of the perfection of God, for he does not change; and the laws of mind are like himself, unchangeable. Inspiration, being similar to vision, must be everywhere the same thing in kind however much it differs in degree. The quantity of our inspiration depends upon the use we make of our faculties. He who has the most wisdom, goodness, religion, and truth is the most inspired. This inspiration reveals itself in various forms, modified by country, character, education, peculiarity. Minos and Moses were inspired to make laws; David, Pindar, Plato, John the Baptist, Gerson, Luther, Boehme, Fenelon, and Fox were all inspired men. The sacraments of the Church were never designed to be permanent. In illustration of them, Parker sacrilegiously quotes,
"Behold the child, by nature's kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw;
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite."
The Christian Church is held to be a purely human mechanism, and the great defect of Protestantism is its limit of the power of private inspiration. God still inspires men as much as ever, and is immanent in spirit as in space. This doctrine, which is Spiritualism, "relies on no church, tradition, or Scripture, as the last grand and infallible rule; it counts these things teachers, if they teach, not masters; helps, if they help us, not authorities. It relies on the Divine presence in the soul of man; the eternal word of God, which is truth, as it speaks through the faculties he has given. It believes God is near the soul as matter to the sense; thinks the canon of revelation not yet closed, nor God exhausted. It sees him in Nature's perfect work; hears him in all true Scripture, Jewish or Phœnician; stoops at the same fountain with Moses and Jesus, and is filled with living water. It calls God, Father, not King; Christ, brother, not Redeemer; Religion, nature. It loves and trusts, but does not fear. It sees in Jesus a man living manlike, highly gifted, and living with blameless and beautiful fidelity to God, stepping thousands of years before the race of man; the profoundest religious genius God has raised up; whose words and works help us to form and develop the native idea of a complete religious man. But he lived for himself; died for himself; worked out his own salvation, and we must do the same, for one man cannot live for another more than he can eat or sleep for him. It is not the personal Christ but the spirit of Wisdom, Holiness, Love that creates the well-being of man; a life at one with God. The divine incarnation is in all mankind."[277]
Such is the faith avowed and enforced by Theodore Parker. It goes but little beyond a belief in God's existence and general participation in human life. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish his views of Deity from Pantheism; but on more than one occasion he expressed his total dissent from the peculiarity of the Hegelian system. He holds that all we see about us and feel within us testifies of God. Neither speculative nor practical atheism can produce good in the world; we must believe in God's existence, else we have no power whatever to explain the harmony in nature, providence in individual and national life, existence and immortality of the soul, and the suffering to which we fall heir.[278] But Theism clears up every difficulty, and sheds its light upon all departments of human life. This alone can overthrow the popular orthodox theology and enthrone the religion of the Absolute, or true Spiritualism in its stead.
It is a question of grave importance how far the skepticism of Unitarianism, Universalism, and Pantheism has been influential upon the American Church, and how great is the number of those who have become more or less tinctured with the Rationalism of the last five years' importation. Parker claimed that the liberal or Rationalistic thinkers were largely on the increase; but he also informs us that the translation by himself of De Wette's Introduction to the Old Testament, not only proved a financial failure, but that it has had "no recognition nor welcome in America; that it has never had a friendly word said for it in any American journal."[279] Skepticism has been proclaimed principally by public lectures, and, in this form, has made little pretension to logical, exegetical, or metaphysical power. Youths have manifested a decided taste for the works of Carlyle, Emerson, and Parker, while the Phases of Faith is one of the most thumb-worn of all the volumes of our circulating libraries. Yet American Rationalism still lacks consistency and system.