Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/92

Rh hundred hands. Science elevates the mass of men, they perceive the folly of bloodshed, and its sin. Thus War, by a fatal necessity, digs its own grave. The art of production surpasses the art to destroy.

All the wars of polytheistic nations have more or less a religious character. Their worship, however, favoured less the extermination of enemies than their subjugation, while Monotheism, denying the existence of all deities but one, when it is superinduced upon a nation, in a rude state, like Fetichism itself, butchers its captives, as the Jews, the Mahometans, and the Christians have often done—a sacrifice to the blood-thirsty phantom they call a God. In the ruder stages of Polytheism, war is the principal occupation of men. The Military and the Priestly powers, strength of Body and strength of Thought, are the two Scales of Society; Science and Art are chiefly devoted to kill men and honour the Gods. The same weapons which conquer the spoil, sacrifice it to the Deity.

III. But as Polytheism leads men to spare the life of the captive, so it leads to a demand for his service. Slavery, therefore, like war, comes unavoidably from this form of Religion, and the social system which grows out of it. At this day, under the influence of Monotheism, we are filled with deep horror at the thought of one man invading the personality of another, to make him a thing—a slave. The flesh of a religious man creeps at the thought of it. But yet slavery was an indispensable adjunct of this rough form of society. Between that Fetichism which bade a man slay his captive, eating his body and drinking his blood as indispensable elements of his communion with God, and that Polytheism which only makes him a slave, there is a great gulf which it required long centuries to fill up and pass over. Anger slowly gave place to interest; perhaps to Mercy. Without this change, with the advance of the art to destroy, the human race must have perished.