Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/108

92 lous, partial, loving only a few, and of course Himself unlovely. He sits as a tyrant on the throne of the world, and with his rod of iron rules the nations whom he has created for his glory, to damn for his caprice. He is represented as having a little, narrow heaven, where he will gather a few of his children, whining and dawdling out a life of eternal indolence; and a great, wide hell, full of men, demons, and torments lasting for ever and ever. Then, in the name of God, men are bid to have no fellowship with unbelievers, no sympathy with sinners. Nay, you are bidden to hate your brethren of a different mode of religious belief. This fanaticism organizes itself, now into brief and temporary activity, to persecute a saint, or to stone a philanthropist; now into permanent institutions for the defence of heathenism, Judaism, Mohammedanism, or Christianity. The fires in which Catholics and Protestants have burnt their brother Christians, the dreadful tortures which savage heathens have inflicted on the followers of Jesus, have all been prepared by the same cause, hatred in the name of God. It is this which has made many a temporary hell on earth, and fancied and taught an eternal hell beneath it. Brief St Bartholomew massacres, long and lasting crusades against Albigenses or Saracens, permanent Inquisitions, laws against unbelievers, atheists, quakers, deists, and Christians, all spring from this same wantonness of the religious sentiment rioting with ungodly passions of the flesh. The malignant priest looks out of the storm of his hate, and smites men in the name of religion and of God. But then the affectionate man turns off from the God who is "a consuming fire," from the "religion" that scorches and burns up the noblest emotions of mankind, and, if others will have a worship without love in the worshippers or the worshipped, he will have love without religion, and philanthropy without God. So, in the desert, the Arab sees the whirlwind coming with its tornado of fiery sand, and hastens from its track, or lies down, he and his camels, till the horrid storm has spent its rage and passed away; then he rises and resumes his peaceful pilgrimage with thanks to God.

How strong is the family instinct! how beautiful is it when, passion and affection blending together, it joins