Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/199

 legally thought worse to steal church property than any other. To rob a beggar was a small thing; it was a great sin to steal from a meeting-house. To take a whole loaf from a baker's basket was a trifle, but to steal the consecrated wafer from the church-box brought the offender to the stake. Says Charlemagne, "Less mercy is to be shown to men who rob and steal from the church, than to common thieves." In New England, until lately, for striking a clergyman a man was punished twice as much as for striking a layman; not because a bishop is to be blameless, "no striker," and so less likely, and less able, to retaliate, but because he is a holy person. Not long ago there was no penalty in this State for disturbing a moral meeting, but a severe one for disturbing a religious meeting. Opinions connected with religion have had laws to defend them. It was once a capital crime to deny the Trinity, or the inspiration of the Song of Solomon, while a man might deny all the axioms of Euclid, all the conclusions of science, and the law let him alone. It seems that these artificial and foreign "sacred things" cannot take care of themselves so well as the indigenous "things of this world." Religion was thought to extend to certain places, times, things, persons, actions, and opinions, and the law gave them a peculiar protection; but religion was not thought to extend much further. So the law stopped there. About three hundred years ago, an Italian sculptor was burned alive, in Spain, for breaking a statue he had himself made, being angry because the customer would not pay the price for it. The statue was a graven image of the Virgin Mary. Had it been the image of his own mother, he might have ground it to powder if he liked, or he might have beat his own living wife, and had no fault found with him.

There was a deeper reason for this capricious distinction than we sometimes think. Religion ought to be the ruler in all the affairs of men; but before we come to the absolute religion, which will one day do this, men begin with certain particular things which they claim as divine. Religion is to have eminent domain over them, while over other things it has a joint jurisdiction with "the world." It was well that their idea of religion went as far as it did. In the Middle Ages, if a fugitive slave fled to the Catholic