Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/130

Rh drowned out of his hole, a log washed off from the saw mill, a lamb, perchance, or a straggling calf, in some lonely pasture, may perish by the flood ; next week the bowed grass erects itself, and the freshet is forgot. But when the Amazon breaks over its continental bounds, it sweeps great cities from the earth; it floods wide provinces with its nauseous deluge of slime, which reeks its miasma into the air, poisoning with pestilence one half the tropic land. It is as easy for a giant to strike in the wrong place, as for a girl, and the mischief must be proportionate to the strength of stroke. Look over Christendom, Heathendom, and see what ghastly evils come from these mistakes.

The function of a sectarian Priest is to minister to the perversion of this faculty, to perpetuate the error—sometimes he knows it, oftenest he knows it not, but is one of the tools wherewith mankind makes the faulty experiment. But the teacher of a true form of religion is to take this most powerful element, and direct it to its normal work; is to use this force in promoting the general development and elevation of mankind; to husband the periodical inundation of the Amazon, and therewith fertilize whole tropic realms, making the earth bring forth abundantly, not for seven years only, but for seventy times seven, yea, for ever. In that soil which hitherto has borne such flowers as the pyramids, temples, and churches of the world, with peaceful virtues in many a realm, such weeds as Popery and the false doctrines of the popular theology of Christendom, he is to rear the fairest and most useful plants of humanity, health, wisdom, justice, benevolence, piety, whole harvests of welfare for mankind.

Using the word Religion in its wide sense, in the religion of the enlightened man of these times, there are involved three things—Feelings, Ideas, Actions,—which follow in this historic and logical order. At first his religious faculty works instinctively, the result is emotional, a mere Feeling; the next result is reflexional, the intellect is busy, and thereby he becomes conscious of what instinctively went on, and the feeling leads to an Idea ; at length it is volitional, in consequence of the feeling and the idea he wills, and determines the inward phenomena to an outward Action, a deed.