Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/134

118 the audience does not wish to hear it. So he makes a feint of preaching, they a feint of hearing him preach. But he preaches not; they hear not. He is dull as the cushion he beats, they as the cushions they cover. A body of men met in a church for nothing, and about nothing, and to hear nobody, is to me a ghastly spectacle. Did you ever see cattle in a cold day in the country crowd together in an enclosure, the ground frozen under their feet, and no hay spread upon it,—huddling together for warmth, hungry, but inactive, because penned up, and waiting with the heavy, slumberous patience of oxen till some man should come and shake down to them a truss of clean bright hay, still redolent of clover and honeysuckle? That is a cheerful sight; and when the farmer comes and hews their winter food out of the stack, what life is in these slumberous oxen! their venerable eyes are full of light, because they see their food. Ah me ! how many a herd of men is stall-hungered in the churches, not getting even the hay of religion, only a little chaff swept off from old thrashing-floors whence the corn which great men beat out of its husk was long since gathered up to feed and bless mankind! Churches are built of stone. I have often thought pulpits should be cushioned with husks.

Of all melancholy social sights that one sees, few are so sad as a body of men got together to convert mankind to sectarianism by ecclesiastical machinery,—men dead as timber, cut down, dead and dry! Out of wire, muslin, thread, starch, gum, and sundry chemicals, French milliners make by dozens what they call roses, lilies of the valley, forget-me-nots, and the like. Scentless and seedless abortions are they, and no more. What a difference between the flower the lover gathers by the brook-side for his maiden's breast, and the thing which the milliner makes with her scissors; between the forget-me-not of the meadow and the forget-me-not of the shop! Such an odds is there betwixt religious men and Christians manufactured in a mill.

In the factories of England you find men busy all their life in making each the twenty-sixth part of a watch. They can do nothing else, and become almost as much machines as the grindstone which sharpens their drill, or the rammage which carries their file. Much of our ecclesiastical machinery tends to make men into mere fixtures in a mill.