Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/176

160 to the strong, but in subordinating matter to mind, instinct to conscious reason, and then coordinating all men into one family of religious love.

II. Here is the other cause. Much of this lack of joy comes from false notions of religion,—false ideas of God, of man, and of the relation between the two. We are bid to think it wicked to be joyous. In the common opinion of churches a religious man must be a sad man, his tears become his meat. Men who in our day are eminent "leaders of the churches" are not joyous men; their faces are grim and austere, not marked with manly delight. Some men are sad at sight of the want, the pain, and the misdirection of men. It was unavoidable that Jesus of Nazareth should ofttimes be "exceeding sorrowful." He must indeed weep over Jerusalem. The Apostles, hunted from city to city, might be excused for sadness. For centuries the Christian Church had reason to be a sad Church. Persecution made our New England fathers stern and sour men, and their form of religion caught a stain from their history. I see why this is so, and blame no man for it. It was once unavoidable. But now it is a great mistake to renounce the natural joy of life; above all, to renounce it in the name of God. No doubt it takes the whole human race to represent in history the whole of Human Nature; but if the "Church," that is theological men, make a mock at joy, then the "world" will go to excess in the opposite extreme. Men in whom the religious and moral powers are not developed in proportion with the intellectual, the æsthetic, or the physical appetites, will try to possess this joy, and without religion. But nothing is long fruitful of delight when divorced from the consciousness of God; nothing thrives that is at enmity with God. Such joy is poor, heartless, and unsatisfying. Men in churches set up a Magdalen, a nun, a monk, a hermit, or a priest, as a representative of religion. Men out of churches want joy; they will flee off where they can find it, and leave religion behind them. Yet joy without religion is but a poor, wandering Hagar, her little water spent, her bread all gone, and no angel to marshal the way to the well where she shall drink and feed her fainting child, and say, Thou, God,