Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/158

Rh organize it out of you; engineering for the great religious enterprises of mankind, and leading the way in all the progressive movements of the race? Then encourage this young man in his best efforts, rebuke all meanness, cowardice, dishonesty, affectation, sloth, all anger, all hate, all manner of unfaithfulness. Cheer and bless him for every good quality; honour his piety and morality; reverence all self-reliant integrity, all self-denying zeal. Bid him spend freely his costliest virtue, 'twill only greaten in the spending. If he have nothing to say, let him say it alone; make no mockery of hearkening where ears catch only wind, and the audience get cold; give him empty room. But if he have truth to tell, listen and live!

Do you want such a minister as superintendent of the highest husbandry, the culture of your soul? or a parasite, a flunkey, who will lie lies in your very face, giving you all of religion except feelings, ideas, and actions; a man always quoting and never living; making your meanness meaner after it is baptized and admitted to the church, and stuffed with what once to noble men were sacraments! Then I will tell you where to find such "by the quantity," at wholesale. I will show you the factories where they are turned out for the market. Nay, give me any pattern of minister which you require, I will lead you to the agent, who will copy it exactly, and from dead wood now stored away in churches laid up to dry, in three years furnish the article, made to order as readily as shoemakers' lasts, and by a similar process, "warranted sound in the faith"—if not in that "once delivered to the saints," at least in that now kept by the sinners! There are towns in Virginia which breed slaves for the plantations and the bagnios of the South; and also northern towns which breed slaves for the churches. God forgive us for taking his name in vain!

I know some men think the minister must be a little mean man, with a little mind, and a little conscience, and a little heart, and a little small soul, with a little effeminate culture got by drivelling over the words of some of humanity's noblest men; who never shows himself on the highway of letters, morals, science, business, politics, where thought, well girt for toil, marches forth to more than kingly victory; but now and then creeps round in the