Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/82

Rh sky, and similar things, depend on the caprice of the Deities. The jugglers can make it rain; a witch can split the moon; a magician heal the sick. Law is resolved into miracle. The most cunning men, who understand the Laws of Nature better than others, are miracle-workers, magicians, priests, necromancers, astrologers, soothsayers, physicians, general mediators and interpreters of the Gods; as the Mandans called them “great medicine-men.”

Then as men experience both joy and grief, pain and pleasure, and as they are too rude in thought to see that both are but different phases of the same thing, and affliction is but success in a mask, it is supposed they cannot be the work of the same Divinity. Hence comes the wide division into good and evil Gods, a distinction found in all religions, and carefully preserved in the theological doctrines of the Christian Church. Worship is paid both to the good and evil Deity. A sacrifice is offered to avert the wrath of the one, and secure the favour of the other. The sacrifice corresponds to the character ascribed to the Deity, and this depends again on the national and personal character of the devotee.

Now in that stage of civilization where every man has his own personal Deity, and no two perhaps the same, the bond that unites man to man is exceedingly slight. Each man's hand is, in some measure, against his brother's. Opposition, or unlikeness, among the Gods, leads to hostility among men. Thus family is arrayed against family, tribe against tribe, nation against nation, because the peculiar God of the one family, tribe, or nation, is deemed hostile to all others. Therefore among cruel nations, whose Gods of course are conceived of as cruel, the most