Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/266

254 formal prayer of words; the church is they that love the Lord; it takes all the church to preach all the gospel, and without that cannot all mankind be saved!" "No vicarious sprinkling of babies, but the voluntary plunging of men," cried the Anabaptist. Thereat the theocratic Puritan lifted his hands and scourged the Baptist and smote the Quaker stone dead. But the palm-tree of toleration sprang out of Mary Dyer's grave. The theocracy got routed in many a well-contested fight; in this city of the Puritans, the Catholic, the Quaker, the Anabaptist, the Jew, and the Unitarian may worship or worship not, just as they will. But this fight is not over; yet it is plain how the battle is going. The theocracy is doomed to the cave of Pope and Pagan. Let us give it our blessing—as it goes. The Puritan fled from episcopal England to tolerant Holland, to the wilderness of America. But he brought more than Puritanism along with him,—humanity came in the same ship. The great warfare for the right of man’s nature to transcend all the accidents of his history, began in the name of religion—the instinct whereunto is the deepest in us, the innermost kernel and germinal dot in the human spirit; Luther's hammer shook the world. During mid-winter, in Switzerland, when the snow overhangs heavily from every cliff, if the traveller but clap his hands and shout aloud, the mountains answer with an avalanche. When Martin lifted up his voice amid the mediaeval snows of Europe, half Christendom came down in that great landslip of churches. Other snows have since fallen; other voices will be lifted up; other church-slides will follow—for every mountain shall be levelled, and the valleys filled. The Bible took the place of the Mass-book, the minister of the priest, the independent society of the Papal church. The glorious liberty of the children of God is to be the final result of all.

II. Next came the protest against Monarchy. The Anglo-Saxons never loved single-headed, absolute despotism. How the barons fought against it! But it was left for "His Majesty's faithful Commons" to do the work. The dreadful axe of Puritanic Oliver Cromwell shore off the divine right of kings, making a clean cut between the vicarious government of the middle ages, and the personal