Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/207

194 business to "pacify God," who yet needs no appeasing; they would save men from the fabulous "wrath to come," not from the real evils of want, ignorance, vice, oppression, and abnormal conduct in all its thousand forms; they tell us to get rid of human nature, not to avoid the errors of human experiment, not to develope this noblest creation of God to its commensurate destination. They tell us that the manliest of all the Greek and Roman heroes, patriots, philosophers, and bards, the women whose beautiful souls bloomed into natural piety, the millions of common people faithful to all which God gave them, must "perish everlasting;" and even the magnanimous saints of the Hebrew or the Christian age were not such by their nature born in them, or their voluntary use of it, but by a "miracle of grace" wrought in their passive substance by the Almighty Artist; that character saves no man; only Christ can "redeem!" It is not large, self-reliant manhood which ministers ask to make us "Christians," but the acceptance of another's action in place of my own. You read of "conversions," thickly following in these days: generally it does not mean the education of the man, but how often only that he has learnt a new trick of whining, or of believing something which he cannot even credit when in full possession of himself! Jesus of Nazareth is one of the last men who could be "converted" to this "Christianity" of our times! What a heretic that great magnificent soul would be to our Ecclesiastical Institutions! A missionary of the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts writes from the Crimea: "The soldier is very childlike in some things; he has been so long accustomed to obey that he has not been allowed to form notions or have opinions, and thus he is in a fit state to receive the good news, the glad tidings of salvation; he receives it in simplicity." So in his highest condition the Christian is only a suckling on the miraculous bosom of the church! Must then the sons of the church be only continual babies?

No doubt the Ecclesiastical Institutions of Christendom are the greatest obstacle now in the way of man's progress, retarding and perverting the intellectual, moral, affectional, and religious development of the human race. Still, they are not able to destroy the instinct for progress, and in