Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/177

130 gated the matter;” found there is “an expedient way” for men to follow, and a “God” to punish them if they do not follow it. In moral and religious matters the mass of men must rely on the authority of their teachers. Millions of men, who never made an astronomical observation, believe the distance between the Earth and the Sun is what Newton or Laplace declares it to be. Why should not men take moral and religious doctrines on the same evidence? It is true, astronomers have differed a little—some making the Earth the centre, some the Sun—and divines still more. But men must learn the moral law as the statute law. The State is above each man's private notions about good and evil, and controls these, as well as their passions. Man must act always from mean and selfish views, never from Love of the Good, the Beautiful, the True.

This system would have religious forms and ceremonies to take up the mind of the people; moral precepts, and religious creeds, “published by authority,” to keep men from unprofitable crimes; an established Church, like the Jail and the Gallows, a piece of state-machinery. It is logical in this, for it fears that, without such a provision, the sensual nature would overlay the intellectual; the few religious ideas common men could get, would be so shadowy and uncertain, and men be so blinded by Prejudice, Superstition, and Fancy, or so far misled by Passion and ignorant Selfishness, that nothing but want and anarchy would ensue. It tells men to pray. None can escape the conviction that prayer, vocal or silent, put up as a request, or felt as a sense of supplication, is natural as hunger and thirst, or tears and smiles. Even a self-styled Atheist talks of the important physiological functions of prayer. This theory makes prayer a Soliloquy of the man; a thinking with the upper part of the head; a sort of moral gymnastics. Thereby we get nothing from God. He is the other side of the world. “He is a journeying, or pursuing, or peradventure he sleepeth.” Prayer is useful to the worshipper as the poet's frenzy, when he apostrophizes a Mountain, or the Moon, and works himself into a rapture, but gets nothing from the Mountain or the Moon, except what he carried out.

In a word, this theory reduces the Idea of God to that of