Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/129

116 What is the Russian's subjection to a Czar compared to a Christian's worship of a conception of God who creates millions of millions of men only for the pleasure of squelching them down in bottomless and eternal hell ! In the Crimea, just now, in a single night, the allies burned up a year's provisions for three-and-thirty thousand men—the bread of all Springfield and Worcester for a twelve-month; in fourteen months a quarter of a million Russian soldiers have perished; Moravia is yet black with the desolations of the Thirty Years' war, whose last battle was fought more than two hundred years ago. But what is all the waste of war, the destruction of property, the butchery of men; what are all the abominations of slavery, compared to the eternal torment of a single soul! Yet it is the common belief of Christendom that not one man, but millions of millions of men, are, with unmitigated agony, to be trod for ever runder the fiery foot of God and the Devil, partners in this Dance of the Second Death which never ends, and treads flown a majority of all that are! A man may be mastered by his bodily lusts, the lowest appetites of the flesh, eaten up by his own dogs and swine, the victim of drunkenness and debauchery. All about us there are examples of this fate! But he may also be mastered by his religious instinct, become its slave, and equally ruined. The Spanish inquisitor, thinking he did God service in burning His children for their mode of worship, is a worse form of ruin than the drunkard! Which has most completely gone to waste, the poor uneducated harlot of the street, or the well-endowed minister in Boston, who in the name of God calls on his parish to kidnap a fugitive slave? Consider the millions of men, tormented by dreadful fear, who dare not think, lest God should overhear their doubt—for He is thought to be always eavesdropping, and ever on the watch at the keyhole of human consciousness, hearkening for the footfall of a wandering thought—stab at and run them through, and then impale them on his thunderbolt, fixed in the eternal flame? The evil caused by the perverted appetites of the body is truly vast; but it is nothing when compared to the wide-extending mischief which comes from the perversion of this deepest and strongest instinct of the soul. When a little stream in a country town overflows its banks, a few faggots are swept away from the farmers woodpile, a ground squirrel is