superior to all other historical religions, is not by its
miraculous origin so separated from them that they are
to be contrasted with it purely as falsity with truth. The
history of religions presents phenomena which may be
called not equal but similar to the phenomena observable
in the study of Christianity. Zoroaster, Mahomet,
Buddha, are not judged when they are hastily put into
the category of dupes or impostors. And when you are
led to see that you may classify religions as you classify
plants or rocks or animals ; when you discover the im-
manent law of that religious development of our race,
which, on this domain as on others, has little by little
risen from matter to mind, from the most puerile feticism
to the sublimest conception of God, do you not find it
surpassingly more reasonable to admit that not only
Christianity and Judaism, but also the entire ascensional
movement of man in search after God, is the imposing
movement of the same inmost force, the ever-living and
ever-acting impulse of religious growth P In this point
of view, Jesus, the Son of the human race drawn upwards
of God, has clearly and emphatically pronounced the
word which conscience had before him whispered faintly
and inarticulately, and by uttering it aloud he has made
a similar utterance easy for all. Such were the doubts,
the discoveries, the ideas which grew up in the soul of
Theodore Parker during his sojourn in the university.
