Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/128

112 guidance far out to sea, to warn the mariner of his whereabouts, and welcome him to port and peace. Street-lamps there must be for the thoroughfares of the town, shop-lights also for the grocer and the apothecary j nay, handlights which are made to be carried from room to room and set down anywhere, and numerous they will ever be, each having its own function. This arrangement takes place in the ecclesiastical as well as in municipal affairs, for each sect has its street-lamps and its shop-lights to guide men to its particular huckstery of salvation, and little hand-lights to take into corners where the salesmen and the showmen are all ready with their wares. But the great Faros of Genoa, and Eddystone light-houses of religion, must always be few and far between; the world is not yet rich enough in spirit to afford many of this sort.

Yet even in these men you seldom find the wholeness of religion. One has the sentiments thereof; he will kindle your religious feelings, your reverence, your devotion, your trust, and your love of God.

Another has only its ideas; new thoughts about religion, new truths, which he presents to the minds of men. Analytic, he destroys the ancient errors of theological systems; thrashes the creeds of the churches with the stout flail of philosophy, and sifts them as wheat, winnowing with a rough wind, great clouds of chaff blow off before his mighty vans. Synthetic, he takes the old truth which stood the critical thrashing and is now winnowed clean; he joins therewith new truth shot down from God, and welcomed into loving arms; and out of his large storehouse this scribe, well instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, brings forth things new and old, to serve as bread for the living, and seed-corn to generations not born as yet.

A third, with no eminence of feelings commonly called religious,—none of theological ideas,—will have yet an eminence of justice, and teach personal and social morality as no other man. He may turn to a single speciality of morals, and demand temperance, chastity, the reform of penal law, the reconstruction of society, the elevation of woman, and the education of the whole mass of men; or he may turn to general philanthropy, the universality of