Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/147

134 what a new motive have I for active toil! yea, what consolation in the worst defeat! I can gird my loins with strength, and go forth to any work; or defeated, wounded, conquered, I can fold my arms in triumph still, looking to the eternal victory.

The teacher of religion is with men in their joy and in their sorrow. Old age and youth pass under his eye; he is the patron saint of the crutch and the cradle, and with such ideas—the grandest weapon of this age—he can excite such pious emotions in the maiden and the youth as shall make all their life a glorious day, full of manly and womanly work, full of human victory; and in the experienced heart of age he can kindle such a flame of hope, and trust, and love, as shall adorn the evening with warm and tranquil glories—saffron and purple, green and gold—all round the peaceful sky, and draw down the sweet influence of heaven into that victorious consciousness, and while his mortal years become like the morning star, paling and waning its ineffectual fire, the immortal shall advance to all the triumphs of eternal day.

Hitherto priests and ministers of all forms of religion—I blame them not—have sought to waken emotions, mostly of fear before the God of their fancy, a dark and dreadful God. With such ideas of Him, they had no more which they could do. So the popular religion has been starved with fear, and with malignant emotions even worse. It is under this dreadful whip that men have builded up those pyramids, and mosques, and temples, and cathedrals, and formed those great institutions which outlast empires. Such things belong to the beginning of our pilgrimage. When man was a child he thought as a child. Now shall he put childish things away.

So much for the teacher's relation to the feelings connected with religion.

III. Of the teacher of religion in relation to acts of morality. Religion begins in feeling, the emotional germ; it goes on to thought, the intellectual blade, budding, leafing, and flowering forth prophetic ; it becomes an act, a deed, the moral fruit — full of bread of life for to-day, full of seeds of life for the unbounded future. Morality is keeping the natural laws written of God in the constitution