Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/181

168 THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTIONS AND THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. In the historical progress of many thousand years, out of material nature man has developed all the visible property of the ten hundred million inhabitants of earth. Thence come the pastures, farms, and gardens; the houses, markets, temples, roads of earth, wood, stone, or iron; the towns and cities, the forts and fleets; all the tools of industry or destruction; the instruments for use; the ornaments for beauty. All these are of human creation-thoughts organized in things. Man's mind is their father; the world of matter is the mother thereof. God made us spirit : He gives us matter, and thence have we made all these things which constitute the world of art.

This world of art, thought organized in matter, contains at present two parts: First, What we inherit—our traditional part; and second, What we create—our original part. The traditional requires to be looked over anew. Some of it is of present value and will last longer, perhaps for ever; some of it is no more fit for present use, but must be left to perish, the new and better taking its place. When Xerxes invaded Europe draw-bows were his best weapons of attack, his arrows darkened the air of Thermopylae; now the allied armies at Sebastopol have not a bow-string in all their scientific camp. Once a hatchet of stone was mankind's best tool for creative industry; now axes of steel have driven the tomahawk out of all markets.

All this world of art shares the progress of man; becomes greater in quantity, nicer in quality. It is amenable to perpetual improvement; is revised continually, the good kept, the useless left to perish. Time winnows all harvests with rugged breath—great clouds of chaff go flying all abroad, while the useful grain is thankfully gathered up. The highway of history is marked by works abandoned, tools that have served out their time, superseded, disbanded, left alone.

This all men agree to. None refuses bread because his fathers once fed on acorns and beech-nuts; no woman disdains to ride well-clad in a railroad car, because her mothers only walked, and that barefoot and naked. And what an odds between the savage's world of art and yours