Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/101

Rh while passing from the savage state to the highest civilization—a power which only passes away when the class which bears the name ceases to represent the religious feeling and thought of the nation, and merely keeps the traditions and ceremonies of old time. So long as the priests represent God to the people, they are the strongest class. What are the armies of Saul, if Samuel pleases to anoint a shepherd-lad for king? You see examples of this power of the sacred class in Egypt, in India, in Judea, in Greece and Rome, before the philosopher outgrew the priest. You see it in Europe during the Middle Ages; what monuments thereof are left, marking all the land from Byzantium to Upsala with convents, basilicas, minster, cathedral, dome, and spire! At this day the Mormons, on the borders of American civilization, gather together the rudest white men of the land, and revive the ancient priestly power of darker times, a hierarchic despotism under a republic. In such communities the ablest men and the most ambitious form a sacred class; the Church offers the fairest field for activity. There religion is obviously the most powerful form of power. Men who live in a city where the tavern is taller, costlier, more beautiful and permanent, than the temple, and the tavern-keeper thought a more important man than the minister of religion, who is only a temple-keeper now, can hardly understand the period when such works as the Cathedral at Milan or the Duomo at Venice got built: but a Mormon city reveals the same state of things; Nauvoo and Deseret explain Jerusalem and Carnak.

The religious faculty has overmastered all others; the mind is reckoned "profane" in comparison. Does the priest tell men in its name to accept what contradicts the evidence of the senses, and all human experience, millions bow down before the Grand Lama or the Pope. It is the faith of the Christian world, that a Galilean woman bore the Almighty God in her bosom, and nursed Him at her breast. Augustine and Aquinas stooped their proud intellects and accepted the absurdity. The priests have told the people that three persons are one God, or three Gods one person,—that the world was created in six days ; the people give up their intellect and try to believe the assertion, Grotius and Leibnitz assenting to the tale. Every