Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/167

154 day it is far less common. Examples of fanaticism you find in the Spanish Catholics, who built the Inquisition, to persecute alike Catholic and Protestant, Mahometan and Jew; in the Protestants, who drove the fathers of New England and Pennsylvania from England and Holland to this the American wilderness; examples of it do you find in the Puritan fathers themselves, who persecuted Quakers and Baptists, and put them to death. Nay, Quakers themselves, though sinning less than other Christians, have yet sometimes been guilty of this offence.

This form of piety is, thirdly, distinguished from mysticism. Mysticism is the action of the religious element, attended by the idea that man is nothing, and that God designs to crush him down, not into non-resistance, but into mere passivity; that the religious action is all God asks for, and that is to be purely internal. So, according to the mystic, God is to be served not with all the faculties He has given, but only with this religious faculty, acting to produce emotions of reverence, trust, love, and the rest. Mysticism is sloth before God, as superstition is fear, and fanaticism is hate before God. It exists still in some of the churches, which cultivate only emotions of reverence, of trust, of love, and the like, but never let the love of God come out of the heart in the shape of the love of man.

In superstition and fanaticism there is not a great idea, but a mean and false one ; not a great sentiment of love to God, but a mean one of fear before Him, and of hate towards men. But both of these do excite a great will, and accordingly superstitious men, and still more fanatical men, have always been distinguished for an immensity of will. In mysticism there may be a great idea and a great sentiment; there cannot be a great will. Complete and perfect piety unites all three,—the great thought—of the infinity of God; the great feeling—of absolute love for Him; and the great will—the resolution to serve Him.

I have thought it necessary at the outset to make this distinction between true piety and superstition, fanaticism, and mysticism, for two reasons. First, the religious faculties in action are as liable to mistake and error as the hand or the foot, or any faculty that we possess; and we should therefore guard against mistakes which have al-