Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/210

Rh justice, love, and holiness; never so much love for the Infinite God. But this spiritual activity does not put its new wine in the old leathern bottles of the church. So the church thinks it fit only for the devil's sacrament! It builds no Pyramids, nor Parthenons, nor cathedrals of St Peter, "indulging" a hemisphere in purchased wickedness that it may pile up sandstone and marble in the name of God. It does not engage in a crusade against brother men in the name of Him whose early word was, "Love your neighbour as yourself," and his latest, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!" No colonies are founded in the name of religion, because the nations which swarm forth into new hives have conquered the oppressive church and now can enjoy their religion at home. The Puritan builds him his meeting-house in old England; the Quaker need not "bear his testimony" by leaving the grave of his mother; the Waldenses may fill all the valleys of the Alps, with none to molest or make them afraid. We exaggerate the religiousness of past times and underrate our own. The millions who went to the Holy Land in the Dark Ages, with the red cross on their shoulders, to fight the Saracen, had as little of true religion as the filibusters who would pillage Cuba and Mexico; or the mob who crowded to the funeral of Bill Poole in New York. Once ignorant men honestly affirmed the popular theology; now man enlightened denies it and spurns it away.

Reverence for God sends men to study nature, his undoubted Scriptures—the world of matter his Old Testament, the world of man his New. There was never such a profound and wide-spread love of truth, and search after it. Look at Germany and France, which lead in the world's science, literature, and art; look at England and America, following with our slower Saxon brain, our heavier and more material feet! See how in those perennial diagrams of fire men study the thought of God demonstrated in the geometric science of the sky, or in the deeper heaven of man's nature watch the course of those human stars for ever wheeling round the central orb, which is unseen though felt through all our history!

The religious spirit of this age shows itself in the attempt to found better political institutions, which shall in-