Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/69

Rh all the special institutions for agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, to develope the understanding and apply it to various concrete interests. No analogous pains have been taken with the culture of conscience. France has the only academy for moral science in the Christian world! We have statistical societies for interest, no moral societies for justice. We rely only on the moral instinct; its development is accidental, not a considerable part of our plan; or else is involuntary, no part of the will of the most intellectual class. There is no college for the conscience.

Do the churches accomplish this educational purpose for the moral sense? The popular clergy think miracles better than morality; and have even less justice than truth. They justify the popular sins in the name of God; are the allies of despotism in all its forms, military or industrial. Oppression by the sword and oppression by capital successively find favour with them. In America there are two common ecclesiastical defences of African slavery: The negroes are the descendants of Ham, who laughed at his father Noah,—overtaken with drink,—and so it is right that Ham's children, four thousand years later, should be slaves to the rest of the world; Slavery teaches the black men "our blessed religion." Such is ecclesiastical justice; and hence judge the value of the churches to educate the conscience of mankind! It is strange how little the clergy of Christendom, for fifteen hundred years, have done for the morality of the world; much for decorum, little for justice; a deal for ecclesiastical ceremony, but what for ecclesiastical righteousness? They put worship with the knee before the natural piety of the conscience. "Trusting in good works" is an offence to the Christian Church, as well Protestant as Catholic. In Europe the consequences of this defect of moral culture have become alarming, even to such as fear only for money. That intellectual culture, which was once the cherished monopoly of the rich, has got diffused amongst wide ranks of men, who once sat in the shadow of intellectual darkness. There is no development of conscience to correspond therewith. The Protestant clergy have not enlightened the people on the science of religion. The Catholics had little light to spare, and that was spent in