Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/351

304 and Man; relies on the Advocate. Cannot the Infinite love his frail children without teasing? Needs He a chancellor, to advise Him to use forgiveness and mercy? Can men approach the Every-where present only by attorney, as a beggar comes to a Turkish king? Away with such folly. Jesus of Nazareth bears his own sins, not another's. How can his righteousness be “imputed” to me! Goodness out of me is not mine; helps me no more than another's food feeds or his sleep refreshes me. Adam's sin,—it was Adam's affair, not mine.

This system applies to God the language of kings' courts, trial, sentence, judgment, pardon, satisfaction, allegiance, day of judgment. Like a courtier it lays stress on forms—baptism, which in itself is nothing but a dispensation of water; the Lord's Supper, which of itself is nothing but a dispensation of wine and bread. It dwells in professions of faith; watches for God's honour. It makes men stiff, unbending, cold, formal, austere, seldom lovely. They have the strength of the Law, not the beauty of the Gospel; the cunning of the Pharisee, not the simplicity of the Christian. You know its followers soon as you see them; the rose is faded out of their cheeks; their mouths drooping and sad; their appearance says, Alas, my fellow-worm! there is no more sunshine, for the world is damned! It is a faith of stern, morose men, well befitting the descendants of Odin, and his iron peers; its Religion is a principle, not a sentiment; a foreign matter imported into the soul, by forethought and resolution; not a native fountain of joy and gladness, leaping up in winter's frost and summer's gladness, playing in the sober autumn or the sunshine of spring. Its Christianity is frozen mercury in the bosom of the warm-hearted Christian, who, by nature, would go straight to God, pray as spontaneous as the blackbird sings, love a thousand times where he hated not once, and count a divine life the greatest good in this world, and ask nothing more in the next. The Heaven of this system is a grand pay-day, where Humility is to have its coach and six, forsooth, because she has been humble; the Saints and Martyrs, who bore trials in the world, are to take their vengeance by shouting “Hallelujah, Glory to God,” when they see the anguish of their old persecutors, and the “smoke of their torment ascending up for ever