Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/151

138 arqne;" Louis claimed to be himself the state, but the priest was so more than the king. Luther controlled kingdoms; the word of powerful John Calvin became the constitution of Geneva, it moulded the Swiss cantons, and had a powerful political influence wherever thoughts of that great thinker went.

Look at the founders of the American churches—at Robinson, and Cotton, and Hooker, and Davenport, and Wilson; at Higginson and Roger Williams! Ask Edwards and Hopkins, ask Mayhew and Channing, if the minister should teach that politics have nothing to do with religion, and religion nothing to do with politics! You might as well say the sailor had nothing to do with the ocean, and New England manufacturers no concern with the Connecticut and the Merrimac, with wind, or water, or fire! Look at the actual politics of America, at the open denial of the higher law, at the politician's insolent mock against all religion, and see the need that the teacher should lay down the great moral principles of human nature, and apply them to the political measures of the day. It is only when the minister is a purchased slave that he tells men Christianity has nothing to do with political conduct, and praises the practical atheist as the "model Christian."

Then come the morals of society. Here the teacher must look at the dealings of men in their relations of industry and of charity, and set forth the mutual duty of the strong and the weak, the employer and the employed, the educated and the ignorant, the many and the few. Natural religion must be applied to life in all departments of industrial activity; farming, manufacturing, buying and selling, must all be conducted on the principles of the Christian religion, that is, of natural justice. The religious word must become religious flesh—great, wide, deep, universal religious life. The deceit and fraud of all kinds of business he must rebuke, and show the better way, deriving the rule of conduct from human nature itself.

I know there are men, yea, ministers, who think that "Christianity" has no more to do with "business" than with politics. It must not be applied to the liquor trade, or the money trade, or the slave trade, or to any of the