Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/107

Rh of the last century, its Encyclopaedia of scoffs at religion, were the unavoidable counterpart. Voltaire and Diderot took vengeance for the injustice done to their philosophic forerunners. The fagots of the Middle Ages got repaid by the fiery press of the last generation.

You may try and develope the soul to the neglect of conscience:—your Antinomian will recognize no moral law: "All things are permissible to the elect; let them do what they will, they cannot sin, for they are born of God; the moral law is needless under the Gospel," says he. Religion will be made the pander of wrong, and priests will pimp for respectable iniquity. God is thus represented as unjust, partial, cruel, and full of vengeance. The most unjust things will be demanded in his name; the laws and practices of a barbarous nation will be ascribed to God, and men told to observe and keep them. Religion will aim to conserve the ritual barbarities of ruder times. Moral works will be thought hostile to piety,—goodness regarded as of no value, rather as proof that a man is not under the "covenant of grace," but only of works. Conscience will be declared an uncertain guide. No "higher law" will be allowed in religion,—only the interest of the politician and the calculation of the merchant must bear rule in the State. The whim of some priest, a new or an old traditionary whim, must be the rule in the Church. It will then be taught that religion is for the Sunday and "holy communion;" business for the week, and daily life. The "most respectable churches" will be such as do nothing to make the world a better place, and men and women fitter to live in it. The catechism will have nothing to do with the conduct, nor prayers with practice. But if the churches will have religion without morals, many a good and conscientious man will go to the opposite extreme, and have morals without religion,—will jeer and mock at all complete and conscious piety; eminently moral men will flee off from the churches, which will be left with their idle mummeries and vain conceits.

Men sometimes seek to develope the religious element while they depress the affectional. Then they promote fanaticism—hate before God, which so often has got organized in the world. Then God is represented as jea-