Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/181

Rh man of being loved. "We are conceived in sin," quoth theology; "the 'God-man' was born with no human father."

It seems commonly thought that the joys of religion are inconsistent with active daily life. Men who have written thereof are chiefly ascetic and romantic persons of retired lives, of shy habits; they prefer thought to work, passive contemplation to active meditation, and dreamy sentimentalism to all other and manlier joys. The natural result of this is ecstasy, not the normal activity of the whole man, but irregular, extravagant, and insane action of a few noble powers. Hence those writings are not wholesome; the air they exhale is close and unhealthy, for such pietism is the sickness of the soul, not its soundness and its health.

I believe what I say will apply to almost the whole class of writers on sentimental religion,—to the mystical writers of the Brahminic, Buddhistic, Christian, and Mahometan sects. He must be a whole man who writes a sound book on a theme so deep as the religious joys of man,—his delight in Nature, in man, and in God. But the false ideas of the popular theory corrupt the faculties of noble and great men. So, in the writings of Law and Fenelon, of Taylor and Henry More, you find this unhealthiness pervading what they do and say. There is much you sympathize in, but much also which offends a nice taste, and revolts the reason, the affections, and all the high faculties of a sound man. You may see the excess of this unhealthiness in the works of St Bridget or of St Theresa, in Molinos and Swedenborg, even in Taylor, in Fenelon, and Augustine; in the dreams and fancied revelations of monks and nuns, when nature clamoured for her rights, or in the sermons and prayers of ascetic clergymen, whom a false idea of God and religion has driven to depravity of body and sickness of the soul.

We may see the effects of this false idea on the conduct and character of active men in a Methodist camp-meeting ; or in a form yet more painful, in the pinched faces, and narrow, unnatural foreheads of men and women early caught and imprisoned in some of the popular forms of fear of God. I have sometimes shuddered to hear such men talk of their joy of religion,—a joy unnatural and