Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/212

Rh with other sense which human science gives; and in his fingers the dumb man finds a tongue, and yet no miracle. In his right mind the lunatic sits clothed. The harlot, seduced by passion once, or scourged by want, must now be wooed back to comely womanhood once more; the nun, no longer in idle dreams worshipping the "Virgin Mother of God," reclaims these hard-entreated sisters of men, daughters and victims, the clean hand washing that so deeply polluted. Children derelict of their parents—wrecks of drunkenness, ignorance, and crime-must find fathers and mothers in the public lap. Nay, the poor fool—whom in "the ages of faith" kings and Popes mocked at, who, rigged with motley cap and bells, went a hideous jest, the companion of apes, in theologic and monarchic courts, and even in the humane Bible, was pointed at with dreadful hootings—in the new democracy must now be lifted up to the dignity of man. Even the abortions of humanity must be respected and beloved. Walls of partition fall away from between us; the patient philanthropist knows no race but the human, no class but of men. and women. The Turk must not be oppressed, though the unity of Christendom be broke to rescue him; and now the foremost nations of the Latin and the Teutonic church join hands to help the Mohammedan against the Christian of Russia. "The Jews are the slaves of the church," said St Thomas Aquinas, "which can dispose of their goods." Now the Jew must have the same rights as the Christian, for these depend on human nature itself. Wars must cease; the fetters fall from the limbs of the slave; if Christian theology chain him, the chain will drag down the unmanly church. The savage must be fed with the science of the civilized. Woman must be the equal of man, rejoicing in the same ecclesiastic, political, social, domestic, and individual rights, commensurate with her duties and her nature; and so the garden wherein God put the choicest human mould and planted the divinest seeds of heaven, long trodden under foot and made the commonshore of ambition and of lust, must now bring forth its natural flowers of humanity, whose fragrance is the breath of God, and their fruit for the healing of the nations.

Behold the great philanthropies of our time! But in