Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/155

142 and delight of every limb of the body, every faculty of the spirit, and all the powers we possess over matter and man ; let him set forth the five great ideas of a scientific theology, and what an affluence of good will rain down from him!

What a field is before the religious teacher, what work to be done, what opportunities to do it all I Here is a false theology to be destroyed; but so destroyed that even every good brick or nail shall be kept safe; nay, the old rubbish is to be shot into the deep to make firm land whereon to erect anew; out of the good of the past and present a scientific theology, with many a blessed institution, is to be builded up. Great vices are to be corrected—war between state and state; oppression of the government over the people; there is the slave to be set free—bound not less in the chain of "Christian theology" than with the constitution and the law. The American church is the great blood-hound which watches the plantations of the South, baying against freedom with most terrific howl. "Christian theology" never breaks a fetter, while Christian religion will set all men free ! Woman is to be treated as the equivalent of man, with the same natural, essential, equal, and unalienable rights; here is a reform which at once affects one half the human race, and then the other half. Here is drunkenness to be abolished; it is to the Free States what slavery is to the South. Poverty must be got rid of, and ignorance overcome; covetousness, fraud, violence, all the manifold forms of crime, vices of passion, the worser vices of calculation, these are the foes which he must face, rout, overcome. What noble institutions shall he help humanity build up!

The great obstacle in the way of true religion is the false ideas of the popular theology. It has oversloughed human life, has checked and drowned to death full many handsome excellence, and gendered the most noisome weeds. So have I seen a little dainty meadow, full of fair, sweet grass, where New England's water-nymph, the Arethusa, came in June—fresh as the morning star, itself the day-star of a summer on high—yea, many a blessed little flower bloomed out. But a butcher and a leather-dresser built beside the stream which fed the nymph, dis-