Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/206

190 and Augustine made at the heathen superstitions, taking their cue from pagan Lucian of Sainosata, the prince of scoffers; they have given the face of Christendom an anti-Pagan twist which it keeps to this day. How Voltaire and his accomplished coadjutors repeated the mock, at the cost of the followers of Augustine and Arnobius! This is hardly wise, and not reverent. Those things are to be regarded as the work of children who have their snowhouses in winter, their earth-houses in summer, their games and plays,—trifles to us, but serious things to the little folk; of great service in the education of the eye and hand,—nay, of the understanding itself. How the little boy cries because he cannot spin his top like the older brothers! He learns to spin it, and is delighted with its snoring hum; learning skill by that, he by and by goes on to higher acts of boyish life. So is it with these artificial sacraments. Xavier brought a new top to the men of India; Charlemagne slew the Saxons who would not accept his,—as rude boys force the little ones from old to new sports.

It is no evil to have some things of the sort; no more than it is for a boy to ride a stick before he can mount a horse; or for a little girl to fill her arms with a Nuremberg baby before she can manage human children. Only the evil is, that these things are thought the real and natural sacrament of religion ; and so the end thereof is lost in the means. That often happens, and is fatal to religious growth. If the boy become a man, still kept to his wooden stick, counting it a real horse, better than all the trotters and pacers in Connecticut, if he had stables for sticks in place of steeds, and men to groom and tend his wooden hobby; if the girl, become a woman now, still hugged her doll from Nuremberg, making believe it was a child,—loved it better than sons and daughters, and left her own baby to dandle a lump of wood, counting a child only provisional, and the doll a finality,—then we should see the same error that was committed by Xavier and others, and repeated by clergymen and whole troops of Christians. I have seen assemblies of Christian divines, excellent and self-denying men, in earnest session and grave debate, who seemed to me only venerable boys riding cockhorse on their grandam's crutch.