Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/68

52 of the weak, to protect the capitalist and tax the labourer. The powerful have sought a monopoly of development and enjoyment, loving to eat their morsel alone. Accordingly, little respect is paid to absolute justice by the controlling statesmen of the Christian world. Not conscience and the right is appealed to, but prudence and the expedient for to-day. Justice is forgotten in looking at interest, and political morality neglected for political economy; instead of national organization of the ideal right, we have only national housekeeping. Hence come the great evils of civilization at this day, and the questions of humanity so long adjourned and put off, that it seems they can only be settled with bloodshed. Nothing rests secure save in the law of God. The thrones of Christian Europe tremble ; a little touch and they fall. Capitalists are alarmed, lest gold ill got should find an equilibrium. Behind the question of royalty, nobility, slavery,—relics of the old feudalism,—there are other questions yet more radical, soon to be asked and answered. There has been a foolish neglect of moral culture throughout all Christendom. The leading classes have not valued it ; with them the mind was thought better than the moral sense, and conscience a dowdy. It is so in the higher education of New England, as of Europe. These men seek the uses of truth, not truth itself; they scorn duty and its higher law ; to be ignorant and weak-minded is thought worse than to be voluntarily unjust and wicked; idiocy of conscience is often thought an excellence, is never out of fashion. Morality is thought no part of piety in the Church, it "saves" no man; "belief" does that with the Protestants, "sacraments" with the Catholics; it is no part of politics in the State,—not needed to save the nation or the soul.

Of late years there has been a great expansion of intellectual development in Europe and America. Has the moral development kept pace with it? Is the desire to apply justice to its universal function as common and intense with the more intellectual classes, as the desire to apply special truths to their function? By no means. We have organized our schemes of intellectual culture : it is the function of schools, colleges, learned societies, and