Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/213

Rh rite, and belief in a doctrine, which in some men were the result of a long life of piety and hard struggle, actually mean nothing at all. So that the ritual and the creed have no more effect in promoting the "convert's n piety and morality, than would belief in the multiplication-table and the habit of saying it over. You are surprised that the doctrines of Christ do not affect the Christian, and ceremonies which once revolutionized the heart they were born in, now leave the worshipper as cold as the stone beneath his knee. Be not astonished at the result. The marble does not feel the commandments which are graven there; the communion chalice never tastes the consecrated wine. The marble and metal are only mechanical in their action; it was not meant that they should taste or feel.

Then piety, as a sentiment, is taken as the whole of religion; its end is in itself. The tests, liturgical or dogmatic, show that piety is in the man; all he has next to do is to increase the quantity. The proof of that increase is a greatening of love for the form and for the doctrine; the habit of dawdling about the one and talking about the other. The sentiment of religion is allowed to continue a sentiment, and nothing more; soon it becomes less, a sentimentalism, a sickly sentiment which will never beget a deed.

It is a good thing to get up pious feeling; there is no. danger we shall have too much of that. But the feeling should lead to a thought, the thought to a deed, else it is of small value; at any rate, it does not do all of its work for the individual, and nothing for any one beside. This religious sentimentality is called Mysticism or Pietism, in the bad sense of those two words. In most of the churches which have a serious purpose, and are not content with the mere routine of office, it is a part of the pastor's aim to produce piety, the love of God. That is right, for piety, in its wide sense, is the foundation of all manly excellence. But in general they seem to know only these liturgical and dogmatic tests of piety; hence they aim to have piety put in that conventional form, and reject with scorn all other and natural modes of expressing love to God.

It is a good thing to aim to produce piety, a great good: an evil, to limit it in this way; a great evil, not to leave it free to take its natural form; a very great evil, to keep it