Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/152

Rh practical dealings of man with man. It is not "works" but "faith" which "save" the soul. So the minister who preaches a "gospel" which has nothing to do with politics, preaches also a gospel which has nothing to do with buying and selling, with honesty and dishonesty, with any actual concern of practical life. Leave them and pass them by, not without blame, but yet with pity too. Look at the social life of man—see what waste of toil and the material it wins; here suffering from unearned excess, there from want not merited; here degradation from idleness, there from long-continued and unremitting drudgery. See the vices, the crimes, which come from the evil conditions in which we are born and bred! These things are not always' to continue. Defects in our social machinery are as much capable of a remedy as in our mills for corn or cotton. It is for the minister to make ready the materials with which better forms of society shall one day be made. If possible, he is to prepare the idea thereof; nay, to organize it if he can. What a service will the man render to humanity who shall improve the mechanism of society, as Fulton and Watt the mechanism of the shops, and organize men into a community, as they matter into mills. Yet it is all possible, and it is something to see the possibility.

Then come the morals of the family. Here are the domestic relations of man and woman—lover and beloved, husband and wife; of parent and child, of relatives, friends, members of the same household. Here, too, the teacher is to learn the rule of conduct from human nature itself and teach a real morality—applying religious emotions and theological ideas to domestic life. The family requires amendment not less than the community and state. There is an ill-concealed distrust of our present domestic relations, a scepticism much more profound than meets the ear or careless eye. The community is uneasy, yet knows not what to do. See, on the one hand, the great amount of unnatural celibacy, continually increasing; and on the other, the odious vice which so mars soul and body in an earthly hell. The two extremes lie plain before the thoughtful man, both unnatural, and one most wicked and brutal. Besides, the increase of divorces, the alteration