Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/157

144 therein the venerable beard; or the moose, who came with pliant lip to woo the lilies when sunrise wakened those snow-clad daughters of the idle stream; or the bear, slaking her thirst in the clean water, or swimming with her young across; or the red man, who speared a salmon there and gave the river a poetic name. Look now: the woods have withdrawn, and only frame the handsome fields; the moose and the bear have given place to herds and flocks; the river is a mechanic—sawing, planing, boring, spinning, weaving, forging, iron—more skilful than Tyrian Hiram, or Bezaleel and Aholiab, once called inspired, and clothes the people in more loveliness than Solomon, in all his glory, e'er put on; the red man, as idle as the stream which fed him, he is now three million civil-suited sons of New England, all nestled in their thousand towns, furnished with shop, and ship, and house, and church, and rich with works of thought.

It is the little streams we utilize at first. New England inherited the culture which a thousand generations slowly won; but it took her two hundred years to catch and tame the Merrimac, still serving its apprenticeship. It is chiefly the small selfishness of man we organize as yet, not the great overmastering powers; these wait for more experienced years. But the great river of religious emotion—the Danube, the Nile, the Ganges, the Mississippi, the Amazon of each human continent, which, fed from tallest heaven-touching hills, has so often torn up the yielding soil, and in its torrent dashed the ruins of one country on the next, in a deluge of persecution, crusade, war—one day, a peaceful stream, will flow by the farm and garden which it gently feeds, turn the mills of science, art, literaure, trade, politics, law, morals; will pass by the cottage, he hamlet, the village, and the city, all full of peaceful men and women, industrious and wealthy, intelligent, moral, serving the Infinite God by keeping all His law. What an age will that be when the soul is minister not despot, and the church is of self-conscious humanity!

Do you want a teacher to do for you the noblest work that man can do for man; to tell you of the Infinite God, of the real man, not the fabulous, of the actual Divine Scriptures, of the live religion; to help waken it in you, and