Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/209

196 ism, disgusted with the very name of religion. Do you marvel at it? Remember what has been offered them in that name! Many stop this side of that extreme, but yet have no conscious religion. Full of pious feeling, rich in moral conduct, and in hope for mankind, they are religious without belief in God, and hopeful with no expectation of a future heaven. I look with great pain on the men whom the Christian theology has driven away from religion; they are the confessors and martyrs of the church of the future. Saints of denial, their fidelity drove them forth from institutions which could not satisfy the thoughtful man. They found no rest, "in wandering mazes lost," They went on the forlorn hope of mankind, to storm the castle of despair; they perish in the ditch, crushed by the wall they overthrow. In a better age they would go first and foremost in building up the great temple of piety. Now they only prepare for its foundation, and never see its blessed walls; Simeons who die without the consolation! But how much more do I mourn over the less manly fate of such as accept these institutions, and are benumbed by the narcotics of the church, till all their manhood is paralyzed, and they he there, coffined in their pews, which rest on crumbling graves, stifled with the miasma thereof, swathed about with the mummy-cloths of a theology that is Egyptian in its darkness if not in age, and burthened with a torpor, profound, heavy, and similar to death, were it not visited with fear, that dreadful nightmare which haunts the church! It is better that doubt deprive us of sleep, rather than belief take all our life away. For what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world of theology, and lose the integrity of his own consciousness; or what shall a man get in exchange for his soul? The name "Christian;" the title "orthodox!"

I know ministers chide at this as "a material age:" Never was one so spiritual before. There was never so much action of the highest faculties in man—never so much wise thought, such science, such metaphysics, such history, such beautiful creations of intellectual magnificence. There was never so much morality—such keeping of the natural laws of God; never so much benevolence amongst men, nor so much piety—reverence for truth,