Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/214

Rh banded by us, radiant with youthful flowers, and rich with manly fruit of every virtuous sort ; no, it is a certificate of "baptism," of "conversion" to the opinion of the Catholics or the Quakers, or other little sect, or that he is tattooed all over with some man's ancient whim; no healthy spot of natural skin left whole. Adamitic virtue is not welcome there—"salvation is by Christ." Not a sect in the Christian world proclaims "salvation" by character, by honest efforts to do a man's best; not one demands the moral development of all the faculties as the great work of life, and the service of God! Each sect is termagant to war against the fictitious sin of Adam; not one is strongly militant to fight against the incidental errors of our historic development, the great vices which lay waste the sons and daughters of men. They can compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and then teach him that there is "no higher law." "American slavery is a divine institution," and "the fugitive slave bill is worthy of the church of Christ." "According to their pasture so are they filled." Can you expect better work from such tools? Who could cut down the woods of Nebraska with an Indian axe of stone? What if you had only the industrial tools of the Pennsylvania red man three hundred years ago? How would your harvests look? Where would your cities shine?

I say there was never so much normal action of the higher faculties in man ; but there is no Ecclesiastical Institution which can organize and direct this action, or even encourage it. In the churches of America, Mr Polk and Mr Webster are counted better Christians than George Washington or Benjamin Franklin. No philanhropist ranks so high as the authors of the fugitive slave bill. Slavery is "orthodox," "Christian." Ay, is of the Christian theology! There is no popular theology, no science of religion, to go forth in advance of the age, with its great idea of God and of man, a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, leading us out of the house of bondage, through red seas and sandy deserts, to the land of promise. The Hebrew church, which brought Israel up out of Egypt, perished, in Jerusalem; the Buddhistic poorly feeds the half-civilized millions of Asia. The Mohammedan church, which once led the Shemites to such wide