Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/205

192 say, ’Choose, Martin, which thou wilt,’ I would bow me down at his left hand and say, 'Oh! Father, give me search after truth; though I wander and fall into many an error. I will journey ever forward and upward unto Thee!’"

Now all the sects in America share these false ideas, and rest them on a basis which they pretend is Divine. They know only an imperfect God, a depraved mankind, and an antagonistic relation between the two; no revelation but one miraculous, unnatural, and long since ended; no safety but the vicarious "Salvation by Christ!"

The function of the "Christian minister" is not to educate the mind and conscience, and heart and soul of the people; not to learn and teach absolute truth, justice, loveiness, and self-subsistent holiness, but to administer the alleged revelation—of the Bible or the church—and bend and twist "our fallen human nature" into the shape demanded by the Ecclesiastical Institutions : he must bow him down before the old inspiration, not also for himself win and receive the new. The thirty thousand Christian ministers of the United States do not aim to produce natural religion, natural morality in men, the largest development of manhood and womanhood, but to make them partakers of the vicarious salvation, to rid them of human nature, the "natural heart," and appease the wrath of God. Prayer is to humanize the Deity, not to elevate and develope man. Thus religion, the most powerful of all emotiens in man, is turned away from its natural function and disfigures our life; it smutches the face with cowardice and unwomanly terror, and makes us go stooping and feeble, with eyes which dare not look up, and hearts that quiver and quail at the name of eternity, or its God! Hence the ministers of Christianity are no more powerful for good works. Some of them are able men, educated at great cost, no class of men so bookish and academic; a few are devoted, self-denying men; the majority chose their calling with an unselfish love for it ; some of them would lay down their lives for mankind. But while they consider it is their function not to provide for men's bodies by teaching us how to live a natural life of industry, tern-