Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/247



come together to-day, by the Governor's proclamation, to give thanks to God for our welfare, not merely for our happiness as individuals or as families, but for our welfare as a people. How can we better improve this opportunity, than by looking a little into the condition of the people? And accordingly I invite your attention to a Sermon of the State of this Nation. I shall try to speak of the Condition of the nation itself, then of the Causes of that Condition, and, in the third place, of the Dangers that threaten, or are alleged to threaten, the nation.

First, of our Condition. Look about you in Boston. Here are a hundred and forty thousand souls, living in peace and in comparative prosperity. I think, without doing injustice to the other side of the water, there is no city in the old world, of this population, with so much intelligence, activity, morality, order, comfort, and general welfare, and, at the same time, with so little of the opposite of all these. I know the faults of Boston, and I think I would not disguise them; the poverty, unnatural poverty, which shivers in the cellar; the unnatural wealth which bloats in the parlour; the sin which is hid in the corners of the gaol; and the more dangerous sin which sets up Christianity for a pretence; the sophistry which lightens