Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/123

Rh I suppose every earnest man, who knows what religion is, desires to become a religious man, to do the most of religious duty, have the most of religious rights, and enjoy the most of religious welfare; to give the most for God, and receive the most from Him. It does not always appear so, yet really is. At the bottom of our hearts we all wish for that. We have been misled by blind guides, who did not always mean to deceive us; we have often gone astray, led off by our instinctive passion in youth, our voluntary calculation in manhood, yet never meaning to deceive ourselves. But there is none of us who does not desire to be a religious man,—at least, I never met one who confessed it, or of whom I thought it true. But of course, they desire it with various degrees of will.

Writers often divide men into two classes, saints and sinners. I like not the division. The best men are bad enough in their own eyes. I hope God is better pleased with men than we are with ourselves, there are so many things in us all which are there against our consent,—evil tenants whom we cannot get rid of as yet. That smoky chimney of an ill-temper is a torment to poor Mr Fiery, which he has not had courage or strength to remove in fifty winters. To "see ourselves as others see us," would often minister to pride and conceit; how many naughty things, actions and emotions too, I know of myself, which no calumniator ever casts in my teeth. Yet take the worst men whom you can find,—men that rob on the highway with open violence, pirates on the sea, the more dangerous thieves who devour widows' houses and plunder the unprotected in a manner thoroughly legal, respectable, and "Christian," men that steal from the poor;—take the tormentors of the Spanish Inquisition, assassins and murderers from New York and Naples, nay, the family of commissioners who in Boston are willing to kidnap their fellow-citizens for ten dollars a head, and bind them and their posterity for the perennial torture of American slavery;—even these men would curl and shudder at the thought of being without consciousness of God in the world; of living without any religion, and dying without any religion. I know some think religion is rather uncomfortable to live by, but the worst of men, as the best, thinks it is a good thing to die with. Men repent of many