Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/127

114 running to the wildest and most fanatical excess. In rude stages of human history it sometimes appears as a wild instinct, rushing with blind and headlong violence, a lust after God, a rage of barbaric devotion. Thus in the mythic tale it drives Abraham to sacrifice his only son, and in actual history it impels Cybele's priests and a whole nation of Jews to odious mutilation of the flesh ; or maddens Hebrew priests who call God Jehovah, to butcher their brother priests who named him Baal. Among civilized men, in its abnormal form of action, it can silence and subdue the most powerful human affection. In three-fourths of Christendom the most unnatural celibacy is counted a virtue; how it separates the lover from the one beloved, the husband from his wife, yea, the mother from her child! Its power is visibly written in the great buildings of ancient and modern Rome, of Greece, Palestine, India, Egypt, of all the world. Their pyramids and temples, catacombs and churches, are unmistakable monuments of its power. From old Byzantium to modern Dublin, from Cadiz to Archangel, all Europe is crossed with its sign-manual; the handwriting of humanity upon the world is dotted throughout with visible marks of this mighty yet most subtle force.

See what institutions it has built up—the most widely-extended in time and space. The plough passed over Jerusalem eighteen hundred years ago; the temple of Solomon and his successors has gone to the ground; no family speak now the language of King David ; yet on every seventh day in Boston, New York, Cincinnati, Mexico, in all the great cities of the western world, the scattered Israelites assemble to keep the old religious law. Moses has been dead three thousand years, yet in the name of Jehovah his hand still circumcises every Hebrew boy. What hold the popular theology takes on Christendom! Empires are but waves in the sea of Buddhism, Christianity, or Islamism, which ripples into Popes, and Czars, and Sultans, or swells into kingdoms and commonwealths that last whole centuries : these perish, while the great religious institution, like the ocean of waters, still holds on. To-day, a hundred and fifty millions worship as Mohammed bids; two hundred and fifty millions count Jesus of Nazareth as God; while twice that number — so