Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/312

Rh the mockery it met. Christianity was basely corrupted long before it gained the Roman Palace. Had it not been depraved, when would it have reached king's courts; in the time of Constantine, or of Louis XIV.? The quarrels of the Bishops; the contentions of the councils; the superstition of the laymen and the despotism and ambition of the clergy in general; the ascetic doctrine taught as morality; the monastic institutions with their plan of a divine life, are striking signs of the times, and contrast wonderfully with that simple Nazarene and his lowly obedience to God and manly love of his brothers.

Yet here and there were men who fed with faith and works the flame of piety, which, rising from their lowly hearth, streamed up towards heaven, making the shadows of superstition and of sin look strange and monstrous as they fell on many a rood of space. These were the men who saved the Sodom of the Church. Did Christianity fail? The Christianity of Christ is not one thing and human nature another. It is human Virtue, human Religion, man in his highest moments; the effect no less than the cause of human development, and can never fail till man ceases to be man. Under all this load of superstition the heart of faith still beat. How could the world forget its old institutions, riot, and sin, in a moment? It is not thus the dull fact of the world's life yields to the Divine Idea of a man. The rites of the public worship; the clerical class; the stress laid on dogmas and forms; all this was a tribute to the indolence and sensuality of mankind. The asceticism, celibacy, mortification of the body, contempt of the present life; the hatred of all innocent pleasure; the scorn of literature, science, and art,—these are the natural reaction of mankind, who had been bid to fill themselves with merely sensual delight. The lives of Mark Antony, Sallust, Crassus; of Julius Cæsar, Nero, and Domitian, explain the origin of asceticism and monastic retirement better than folios will do it. The writings of Petronius Arbiter, of Appuleius and Lucian, render necessary the works of Tertullian, Cyprian, Jerome, and John of Damascus. Individuals might come swiftly out of Egyptian darkness into the light of Religion, but the world moves slow, and oscillates from one extreme to