Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/182

166 shameful, which delighted in the contemplation of torment as the portion of mankind. Read the Life of St Hugh, an Archbishop of Lyons. See in what his joys of religion consisted. If any one spoke of news in his presence, he checked them, saying, "This life is all given us for weeping and penance, not for idle discourses." It was his "constant prayer that God would extinguish in his heart all attachment to creatures, that His pure love might reign in all his affections." "His love of heavenly things made all temporal affairs seem burdensome and tedious." "Women he would never look in the face, so that he knew not the features of his own mother." He continually recited the Psalter and the Lord's Prayer; the latter on one occasion "three hundred times in a single night!"

In saying all this, I do not wish to blame men. I would rather write an apology for the religious errors of Pagans or Christians, than a satire thereon. I only mention the fact. It is not a strange one, for we find analogous errors in the history of every department of human affairs. What dreams of astrologers and alchemists came before the cool, sober thought of chemists and astronomers! The mistakes in religion are not greater in proportion to the strength of the religious faculty and the greatness of the interest at stake, than the mistakes in agriculture or politics. The theology of Boston is not much worse than its "law and order" just now; and they who, in pulpits, administer the popular theology, are not much more mistaken than they who, in courts and jails, administer the public law. But in religion these mistaken notions have been so common, that the very name of religious joy is associated with superstition, bigotry, extravagance, madness. You attend a meeting "for conference and prayer," and you come away a little disgusted, with more pity than sympathy for the earnest men who have so mistaken the nature of God, of man, and of the relation between the two; who have so erred as to the beginning of religion, its processes, and its result. You pass thence to a meeting of philosophical men met for science, or philanthropic men met for benevolence, and what a change! Both are equally earnest; but in the one all is hot, unnatural, restricted,