Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/98

 majority a right to control the minority, to restrict trade, levy taxes, make laws, and all that? If the nation goes into a committee of the whole and makes laws, some little man goes into a committee of one and passes his counter resolves. The State of South Carolina is a nice example of this self-reliance, and this questioning of all authority. That little brazen State, which contains only about half so many free white inhabitants as the single city of New York, but which none the less claims to have monopolized most of the chivalry of the nation, and its patriotism, as well as political wisdom—that chivalrous little State says, "If the nation does not make laws to suit us; if it does not allow us to imprison all black seamen from the North; if it prevents the extension of Slavery wherever we wish to carry it—then the State of South Carolina will nullify, and leave the other nine-and-twenty States to go to ruin!"

Men ask what right have the churches to the shadow of authority which clings to them—to make creeds, and to bind and to loose! So it is a thing which has happened, that when a church excommunicates a young stripling for heresy, he turns round, fulminates his edict, and excommunicates the church. Said a sly Jesuit to an American Protestant at Rome, "But the rites and customs and doctrines of the Catholic church go back to the second century, the age after the apostles!" "No doubt of it," said the American, who had also read the Fathers, "they go back to the times of the apostles themselves; but that proves nothing, for there were as great fools in the first century as the last. A fool or a folly is no better because it is an old folly or an old fool. There are fools enough now, in all conscience. Pray don't go back to prove their apostolical succession." There are always some men who are born out of due season, men of past ages, stragglers of former generations, who ought to have born before Dr. Faustus invented printing, but who are unfortunately born now, or, if born long ago, have been fraudulently and illegally concealed by their mothers, and are now, for the first time, brought to light. The age lifts such aged juveniles from the ground, and bids them live, but they are sadly to seek in this day; they are old-fashioned boys; their authority is called in question; their traditions and old-wives’ fables