Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/135

Rh So there must be a continual accession of new religious life from without into the churches to keep Christians living. Men of religious genius it is who bring it in. Without them "religion" in cities would become mere traditional theology, and "life in God" would be sitting in a meeting-house, and the baptism in water from an aqueduct taken for the communion of the Holy Ghost. Blessed be God that there are such men not smothered in the surplice of the priest, but still alive in God, and God alive in them! In old towns all the water that fills the wells is dead water,—dead and dirty too; the rinsings of the streets, the soakings of stables, the slop of markets, the wash and offscouring of the town ; even the filterings of the graveyard settle therein, and the child is fed with its grandsire's bones. Men would perish if left alone, dying of their drink. So, far off in the hills, above the level of the town, they seek some mountain lake, and furnish a pathway that its crystal beauty may come to town. There the living water leaps up in public fountains, it washes the streets, it satisfies the blameless cattle, it runs into every house to cleanse and purify and bless, and men are glad as the Hebrews when Moses smote the fabled rock. So comes religious genius unto men: some mountain of a man stands up tall, and all winter long takes the snows of heaven on his shoulders, all summer through he receives the cold rain into his bosom; both become springs of living water at his feet. Then the proprietors of fetid wells and subterranean tanks, which they call " Bethesda," though often troubled by other than angels, and whence they retail their "salvation" a pennyworth at a time, — they cry out with sneer and scoff and scorn against our new-born saint. "Shall Christ come out of Galilee?" quoth they. "Art thou greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle? Who are you?" Thus the man of forms has ever his calumny against the man of God. Religious teachers there will ever be,—a few organizers, many an administrator of organizations ; but inventors in religion are always few. These are the greatest external helps to the manhood of religion. All great teaching is the teacher's inspiration; this is truer in religion than in