Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/129

Rh moral excellence, — it all comes from the same root, and with grateful welcome should be received.

Each of these teachers will do real service to your souls,—quickening the feelings, imparting ideas, and organizing the results of religion in moral acts. I know a great outcry has been made in all the churches against moral reformers, against men who would apply pure religion to common life, in the special or the universal form. You all know what clamour is always raised against a man who would abolish a vice from human society, or establish a new virtue. Every wolf is interested in the wilderness, and hates the axe and the plough of the settler, and would devour his child if he dared. So every nuisance in society has its supporters, whose property is invested therein. Paul found it so at Ephesus, Telemachus at Rome, and Garrison in America. I doubt not the men of Ephesus thought religion good in all matters except the making of silver shrines for Diana; "there it makes men mad." Men cry out against the advance of morality; "Preach us religion; preach us Christianity, Christ and him crucified, and not this infidel matter of ending particular sins, and abounding in special virtues. Preach us the exceeding sinfulness of sin, 'original sin,’ 'which brought death into the world and all our woe;' preach the beauty of holiness and the like of that, and let alone the actual sins of society, of the shop and the church and the State;—be silent about drunkenness and lust, about war, slavery, and the thousand forms of avarice which we rejoice in. Is it not enough, Preacher, that we give you of our purse and our corporeal presence, that we weekly confess ourselves 'miserable offenders,’ with 'no health in us,’ and fast, perhaps, twice in our lives, but you must convict us of being idolaters also; yea, drunkards, gluttons, impure in youth and avaricious in manhood,—once a Voluptuary, and now a Hunker! Go to now, and preach us the blessedness of the righteous, Christ and him crucified!" When money speaks, the Church obeys, and the pulpit preaches for doctrine the commandments of the pews.

But it is these very moral reformers, who, in our time, have done more than all others to promote the feeling of piety which the churches profess so much to covet. The new ground of religion which the churches occupy is