rs; 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 Phoenician; 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