Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/166

150 rest of Christendom was an occasion of festivity, was to them a day of grimness and of fearing the Lord ; a weariness to the old men, and an intolerable burden to the children. Look at the pictures of those men, so bony and gaunt and grim; of the women, so austere and unloving in their look. The unjoyous characteristics of Puritanism still cleave to us, and colour our mode of religion at this day, and, spite of ourselves, taint our general philosophy and view of life.

The Catholic Church is less serious, less in earnest with religion, than the Church of the Puritans, — less moral and reliant on God than the Protestant Church in general,—so it seems to me; but even there little room is left for joy. Their richest music is a, Miserere, not an Exultemus or a Te Deum. The joyous chanting of Christmas, of Easter, and of Pentecost is inferior to the sad wail of Palm Sunday and Good Friday. The Stabat Mater and the Dies Iræ are the most characteristic hymns of the Catholic Church. The paintings and statues are chiefly monuments of woe,—saints in their torments, Jesus in his passion; his stations are stations of affliction, and the via sacra of his life is painted as a long via dolorosa: God is represented as a Thunderer, distinguished chiefly by self-esteem and destructiveness.

Take the Christian Church as a whole, from its first day to this, study all expressions of the religious feeling and thought of Christendom, in literature, painting, and music, it is strangely deficient in joy. Religion is unnatural self-denial; morality is symbolized by a celibate monk, eating parched pease and a water-cress ; piety, by a joyless nun. The saints of the Christian Church, Catholic and Protestant, are either stern, heroic men, who went first and foremost on a field of battle, to peril their lives, men whose heroism was of iron,—and they have never been extolled above their merit,—or else weeping men, sentimental, sickly, sad, sorrowful, and afraid. Most preachers would rather send away their audience weeping, than with a resolute, a cheerful, and a joyous heart. Yet nothing is easier to start from a multitude than a tear. Cotton Mather, in his Life of his kinsman, Nathaniel, a pious clergyman who died young, mentions as his crowning merit the fulness of his fastings, the abundant mortifications he needlessly