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Apostolic Church, as we have proved in a preceding article, and as Unitarians themselves will admit. Then they must either fellowship Mr. Parker as a Christian teacher, or return to the bosom of the Catholic Church, whose authority is not her own, but that of God speaking and governing, supernaturally, in and through her.

But, if we believe Mr. Parker has the advantage in the argument with Unitarians, we have no wish to see him sustained, and we have not the least conceivable sympathy with the views and movement he for the moment represents. His doctrines are superficial, unphilosophical, unchristian, false, and pernicious. The fact, that they can find warm admirers and partisans in our professedly Christian community, tells a sad tale for our intelligence, faith, and morals. They are the most damnable doctrines the devil can desire to have propagated. Their prevalence would be ruinous to social order and moral wellbeing here, as well as to the soul hereafter.

Mr. Parker, as a man, may have some amiable and interesting qualities; he may have a lively fancy and an excellent memory; he may have made very respectable literary acquisitions, and be able to write in a style of more than ordinary beauty and effectiveness; but all this cannot excuse his abuse of God's gifts, and perversion of them to the very worst of causes, or be a valid plea for standing before the public under a false name, and in a character not his own. He knows that he is not, in any received sense of the word, a Christian believer, that he is what all the world understand by an infidel, and yet he would fain palm himself off upon the community as a Christian teacher. We cannot reconcile this with that high moral sense and heroic virtue claimed for him by his friends. He has, moreover, proved himself insensible to the moral obligation every man incurs who puts forth doctrines on his own authority. He has been refuted more than once, both as to his literature and philosophy, his scholarship and his theology, and from sources not unworthy of the respectful consideration of greater and more learned men than he. If half that has been urged against his doctrines in the Christian Review, Christian Examiner, Boston Quarterly Review, and other journals, be well founded, his doctrines are unsupported by a single particle of evidence, and rest only on ignorance of sound philosophy, misstatements of historical facts, misquotations, and false and unwarrantable glosses of the Sacred Scriptures, and other writ

ings to which he refers. It was his duty, as a professed public teacher, on the appearance of these apparent refutations, either to retract his doctrines, or to show that they might be true in spite of what was alleged against them. He has done neither. He has not proved himself possessed of the humility to retract, nor the courage to reply. We concede the craft of his silence, and that, if his motive be to gather a party around him, silence is unquestionably his wisest and truest policy; for a lie well stuck to will pass with the multitude unquestioned, and be embraced as God's truth. But the honesty of such craft, the morality of such policy, is worthy of the serious consideration of those who are so loud in claiming Christian fellowship for Mr. Parker on the ground of his life and character. Thus far, moral as he is, he has proved himself void of all sense of moral responsibility as a public teacher, and that he feels himself privileged to bring scandalous charges against the whole Christian world, and when called upon to sustain them, to slink back into the dark, and wait his opportunity to reiterate them. In this he not only refuses to give to them that ask him a reason for the hope he professes to entertain, but disgraces our common manhood, and may well be treated not only as an alien from the commonwealth of Christ, but as an outlaw from the republic of letters.

It is this false position in which Mr. Parker stands before the public, and this cowardly, if not dishonest, policy of continuing to reiterate his doctrines without replying to the grave objections urged against them, that give him his present importance and influence. In his true light, standing forth under his own name, and attempting in a fair and manly way to maintain himself, he would attract no great attention, and gain few partisans. He has, no doubt, very considerable abilities; he has unquestionably looked over quite a variety of books, and can tell the titles of a great number; he has, we cheerfully admit, dipped into many subjects, and can talk flippantly on most topics that come up in conversation; he has a lively fancy, and even some humor; but he is no miracle; his scholarship is rarely to be trusted; his statements, even on indifferent matters, cannot be taken with confidence, unless backed by some authority beside his own; and as a thinker he is singularly crude, vague, loose, and superficial. He throws no light on any subject he treats, settles no disputed passage in literature, history, criticism, philosophy, or theology, speculative or practical, and he uniformly leaves every subject he touches more confused than

he found it. This even his friends must admit. We have neither time nor patience to go into any general examination of Mr. Parker's doctrines, nor could we, if we had, consent to do so, while he claims the moral right to ignore what is said against them, and to continue to repeat, as if nothing had happened, the often refuted falsehood. All that is proper to do, in the case of such a man, is, to strip off his sheep's clothing, and let him stand before the public in his utter nakedness.

Mr. Parker is one of the chiefs of the American Transcendentalists. He may or he may not run into all the vagaries of some well known members of the sect; but he is a Transcendentalist, and a Transcendental chief. The Transcendentalists are, as is well known, far from agreeing on all points among themselves; but they all agree in asserting the Divinity of human nature, and that God speaks to us in the instincts or sentiments of our own nature, and not otherwise. They have adopted a very ancient doctrine, and hold what the serpent said to Eve to be the truth. Thus they say, "We are gods, knowing good and evil." At bottom, they are Pantheists, though few of them have the ability or the patience to mould their views into a well defined Pantheism. They profess to be spiritualists, talk much of "the soul," "the noble soul," "the great soul," and "the soul of all." They affect great devoutness, and talk much of pious instincts and pure affections, which, however, are confessedly nothing but natural sentiments, and need but fitting opportunity to become beastly lusts. They have much to say of God, but they deny his personality, his freedom, his providence, and conceive of him, now, as a mighty force pushing itself forth in a world, a man, an elephant, an insect, a moss, simply because it is force, and must do so, or not be force; and now, again, they conceive of him as an idea, as man's idea of the Greatest and Best, and varying as vary men's intellectual and moral conceptions, one thing with the rude savage, another with Plato, another with St. Paul, and still another with Theodore Parker;-growing always with the growth of humanity, a small affair with the savage, almost as good as no God at all; but great, grand, magnificent, sublime, with the aforesaid Theodore Parker, and to be even more sublime with the future Theodore Parkers in store for us, and who, one by one, with long intervals between, will arise to bless humanity and transform their age and live through the ages.

Revelation is what man's nature reveals to himself, or what he gathers spontaneously from his own ideas, sentiments, wants,

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tendencies, if this means any thing. It is supernatural, because it does not come from the material world, but from the inward soul; and divine, because from man's nature, which is itself divine. Each man is God incarnate; not because there is in each the two natures, but because the human and Divine natures are, at bottom, not two natures, but one and the same nature. The distinction commonly supposed to exist between God and man is merely phenomenal. God is man, and man is God. Who says I, meaning thereby a really substantive existence, says God; and who says God, says I. Hence, to know the will of God, we have but to turn our minds in upon ourselves, to follow the example of the Grand Lama of me and not-of whom Doctor Evariste de Gypendole speaks in the preceding article, and fix our eyes devoutly upon ourselves, and listen to the oracles from the temple within ourselves, or, to be more exact, within our inner self; for, according to our Transcendentalists, the human soul is best illustrated by an onion, and you do not get at the real self till you have stripped off fold after fold, and come to the innermost of all.

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Christianity is accepted; O, yes, and as divine; for it is one of the forms with which the human race has sought to clothe its religious sentiment, or in which it has sought to realize its conceptions of the Greatest and Best. By the same title they accept the Fetichism of the African negroes, the Polytheism of the Greeks and Romans, Brahminism, Budhism, Mahometanism, and all other religions which have been or are. They are all divine, because they are all human, the product of the human race. Of all these, Christianity is to be regarded as the least inadequate. For a time it responded to all the religious wants of the soul, and was, during that time, eminently true, eminently useful. But it has had its day. The human race, in its onward march through the ages, leaves it behind, casts it off, as the mature man does the garments of his childhood, and seeks now a new form for its religious sentiment, one more in harmony with its present advanced intelligence, which shall better befit its more mature age and growth.

As for our blessed Saviour, they are, in general, disposed to patronize him. They speak of him as an extraordinary "Hebrew youth," a noble soul, a pure and lofty spirit, a bold and earnest reformer, discarding all the conventionalisms of his time, breaking loose from all the existing institutions of Church and State, despising the authority of the popular faith and morality of his age and country, even of Moses and the prophets,

and speaking out, from the depths of his own broad and living nature, great moral truths demanded by, and responding to, man's universal moral and religious sentiments, in a word, a sort of Theodore Parker of the first century, minus Theodore Parker's learning and philosophy.

It were easy to confirm all this by extracts taken at random from the writings of leading Transcendentalists. Take the following from Mr. Parker.

"In an age of corruption, as all ages are, Jesus stood and looked up to God. There was nothing between him and the Father of all: no old world, be it of Moses or Esaias, of a living rabbi or Sanhedrim of rabbis: no sin or perverseness of the finite will. As the result of this virgin purity of soul and perfect obedience, the light of God shone down into the very deeps of his soul, bringing all of the Godhead which flesh can receive. He would have us do the same; worship with nothing between us and God; act, think, feel, live, in perfect obedience to Him: and we never are Christians as he was the Christ, until we worship as Jesus did, with no mediator, with nothing between us and the Father of all.”. Critical and Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 161, 162.

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"His life [the life of Jesus] is the perpetual rebuke of all times since. It condemns ancient civilization; it condemns modern civilization. Wise men we have since had, and good men ; but this Galilean youth strode before the world whole thousands of years, much of Divinity was in him. .... In him the Godlike and the Human met and embraced, and a Divine Life was born. Measure him by the world's greatest sons, how poor they are! Try him by the best of men, how little and low they appear! . . . . But still was he not our brother; the son of man, as we are; the Son of God like ourselves? His excellence, was it not human excellence? His wisdom, love, piety, sweet and celestial as they were, they not what we also may attain ? ” — 1b. p. 157.

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"Amid all this [Jewish corruption, sin, prejudice, and formalism], and the opposition it raised to a spiritual man, Jesus fell back on the moral and religious sentiments in man; uttered their oracles as the Infinite spoke through them; taught absolute religion, absolute morality, nothing less, nothing more; laid down principles as wide as the soul, true and eternal as God."- Discourse, pp. 256, 257.

"Jesus looked to God for his truth; his great doctrines not his own, private, personal, depending on his own idiosyncrasies, and therefore only subjectively true, but God's, universal, everlasting, the Absolute Religion. I do not know that he did not teach some errors, also, along with it. I care not if he did. It is by his truths that I know him, the absolute religion he taught and lived." — Relation, &c., p. 14.

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