Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/326

Rh when yielding is required—the Church allowed all this. Its form grew out of the wants of the time and place. Was there no danger that the priesthood, thus able and thus organized, should become ambitious of wealth and power? The greatest danger that fathers should seek to perpetuate authority for their children. But this class of men, cut off from posterity by the prohibition of marriage, lived in the midst of ancient and feudal institutions, where all depended on birth; where descent from a successful pirate, or some desperate freebooter, hard-handed and hard-hearted, who harried village after village, secured a man elevation, political power, and wealth; the clergy were cut off from the most powerful of all inducements to accumulate authority. In that long period from Alaric to Columbus, when the Church had ample revenues; the most able and cultivated men in her ranks, so thoroughly disciplined; the awful power over the souls of men, far more formidable than bayonets skilfully plied; with an acknowledged claim to miraculous inspiration and divine authority, were it not for the celibacy of the Christian priesthood—damnable institution, and pregnant with mischief as it was—we should have had a sacerdotal caste, the Levites of Christianity, whose little finger would have been thicker than the loins of all former Levites; who would have flayed men with scorpions, where the priestly despots of Egypt and India only touched them with a feather, and the dawn of a better day must have been deferred for thousands of years. The world is managed wiser than some men fancy. “Surely the wrath of man shall praise Thee, and the remainder of wrath shalt thou restrain,” said an old writer. The remedy of inveterate evils is attended with sore pangs. These wretched priests of the middle ages bore a burden, and did a service for us, which we are slow to confess.

The Church, reacting against the sensuality and excessive publicity of the heathen world, in its establishment of convents and monasteries, opened asylums for delicate spirits that could not bear the rage of savage life; afforded a hospital for men sick of the fever of the world, worn-out and shattered in the storms of State, who craved a little rest for charity's sweet sake, before they went where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.