Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/92

76 without justice. This seems their function: To protect capital and tax toil.

Hitherto justice has not been done to the affections in Religion. We have been taught to fear God, not to love Him ; to see Him in the earthquake and the storm, in the deluge, or the "ten plagues of Egypt," in the "black death," or the cholera; not to see God in the morning sun, or in the evening full of radiant gentleness. Love has little to do with the popular religion of our time. God is painted as a dreadful Bye, which bores through the darkness to spy out the faults of men who must sneak and skulk about the world ; or as a naked, bony Arm, uplifted to crush his children down with horrid squelch to endless hell. The long line of scoffers from Lucian, their great hierophant, down to Voltaire and his living coadjutors, have not shamed the priesthood from such revolting images of deity. Sterner men, who saw the loveliness of the dear God and set it forth in holy speech and holy life,—to meet a fate on earth far harder than the scoffer's doom,—they cannot yet teach men that love of God casts every fear away. In the Catholic mythology the Virgin Mary, its most original creation, represents pure love, — she, and she alone. Hence is she (and deservedly) the popular object of worship in all Catholic countries. But the sterner Protestant sects have the Roman Godhead after Mary is taken away.

When this is so in religion, do you wonder at the lack of love in law and custom, in politics and trade? Shall I write satires on mankind? Rather let me make its apology. Man is a baby yet; the time for the development of conscious love has not arrived. Let us not say, "No man eat fruit of thee hereafter;" let us wait; dig about the human tree and encourage it ; in time it shall put forth figs.

Still affection holds this high place in the nature of man. Out of our innermost hearts there comes the prophecy of a time when it shall have a kindred place in history and the affairs of men. In the progress of mankind, love takes continually a higher place; what was adequate and well-