Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/161

148 do a great constructive work in religion as here and now. How rich the people are!—in all needed things, I mean—and so not forced to starve their soul that life may flutter round the flesh: how intelligent they are! no nation comes near us in this. The ablest mind finds whole audiences tall enough to reach up and take his greatest, fairest thought. There is unbounded freedom in the North; no law forbids thought, or speech, or normal religious life. How well educated the women are! A man, with all the advantages of these times—rapidity of motion from place to place, means of publishing his thought in print and swiftly spreading it by newspapers throughout the land, freedom to speak and act, the development of the people, their quick intelligence to appreciate and apply a truth—has far more power to bless the world religiously than the Gospels ascribe to Jesus of Nazareth with all his miracles! What was walking on the water compared to riding in a railroad car; what "speaking with tongues" to printing your thought in a wide-spread newspaper; and what all other feigned miracles to the swift contact of mind with thoughtful mind!

Close behind us are Puritans and Pilgrims, who founded New England, fathers of all the North. They died so little while ago that, lay down your ear to the ground, you may almost fancy that you hear their parting prayer, "Oh, Father, bless the seed we planted with our tears and blood. And be the people thine!" Still in our bosom burns the fathers' fire. Through all our cities sweeps on the great river of religious emotion; thereof little streams also run among the hills, fed from the same heaven of piety; yea, into all our souls descends the sweet influence of nature, and instinctively we love and trust. All these invite the scientific mind and the mechanic hand of the minister to organize this vast and wasted force into institutions which shall secure the welfare of the world. Shall we use the waters of New England hills, and not also the religious instincts of New England men P What if a new Jesus were to appear in some American Nazareth, in some Massachusetts Galilee of the Gentiles, and bear the same relation to the consciousness of this age as the other Jesus to his times, what greater opportunities with no miracle would he now possess than if invested with that fabled power to re-