Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/156

Rh gorging therein a flood of pestilence, and soon in place of Arethusa and her fair-faced sister flowers, huge weeds came up from the rank slime, and flaunted their vulgar, ugly dresses all the summer long, and went to seed peopling the spot with worse than barrenness!

Man has made great mistakes in his religious history. Worse than in aught beside. The enforced singleness of monk and nun, the polygamous conjunction of a master and his purchased beasts of luxury at Constantinople or Jerusalem, or at New Orleans, or at Washington; the brutish vice of ancient cities, which swallows down woman quick, into an actual pit worse than that fabled which took in the Hebrew heretics and their strange fire; the political tyranny of Asia Minor and Siberia; the drunken intemperance which reels in' Boston and New York, companion of the wealth which loves the spectacle; all this is not a worse departure from the mutual love which should conjoin one woman and one man, from natural justice, from wholesome food and drink, than the theological idea of God is a departure from the actual God, whom you meet in Nature as the Cause and Providence of all the universe, and feel in your own heart as the Father and Mother of the soul! Let not this amaze you. The strongest boy goes most astray—furthest if not oftenest. It is little things man first learns how to use—a chip of stone before an axe of steel ; how long he rides on asses oefore he learns to yoke fire and water, and command the lightning to convey his thought!

How much this religious faculty has run to waste—rending its banks, pouring otev the dam, or turning the priest's loud clattering mill of vanity, not grinding corn for the toilsome, hungry world. Man sits on the bank, in mortars pounding his poor bread with many a groan, mourning over political oppression, the lies of great and the vanity of little men, over war and want, slavery, drunkenness, and many a vice, while the priest turns to private account this river of God, which is full of water! Will it always be so? Always! Once the streams of New England crept along their oozy beds, where only the water-lily lay in maiden loveliness, or leaped down rocks in wild majestic play. None looked thereon but the woods, which, shagged with moss, bent down and dipped