Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/214

198 indoors so long, that it becomes sick and good for nothing, not daring to go out at all.

It is remarkable how often ecclesiastical men make this mistake. They judge a man to be religious or otherwise, solely by this test. You hear strict ministers speak of a layman as an "amiable man," but "not pious." They do not know that amiableness is one form of natural piety, and that the more piety a man gets, the more amiable he becomes. The piety which they know has no connection with honesty, none with friendship, none with philanthropy; its only relations are with the ritual and creed. When the late John Quincy Adams died, his piety was one topic of commendation in most of the many sermons preached in memory of the man. What was the proof or sign of that piety? Scarcely any one found it in his integrity, which had not failed for many a year; or his faithful attendance on his political duty; or his unflinching love of liberty, and the noble war the aged champion fought for the unalienable rights of man. No! They found the test in the fact that he was a member of a church; that he went to meeting, and was more decorous than most men while there; that he daily read the Bible, and repeated each night a simple and beautiful little prayer, which mothers teach their babes of grace. No "regular minister," I think, found the proof of his piety in his zeal for man's welfare, in the cleanness of his life, and hands which never took a bribe. One, I remember, found a sign of that piety in the fact, that he never covered his reverend head till fairly out of church!

You remember the Orthodox judgment on Dr Channing. Soon after his death, it was declared in a leading Trinitarian journal of America, that without doubt he had gone to the place of torment, to expiate the sin of denying the Deity of Christ. All the noble life of that great and good and loving man was not thought equal to the formal belief that the Jesus of the Gospels is the Jehovah of the Psalms.

After ecclesiastical men produce their piety, they do not aim to set it to do the natural work of mankind. Morality is not thought to be the proof of piety, nor even the sign of it. They dam up the stream of human nature till they have got a sufficient head of piety, and then, instead of setting it to turn the useful mill of life, or even drawing it