Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/215

202 victory, has twice been broken by the dreadful Teutonic arm, and now sees her crescent in its last quarter; its silver light is too feeble for nations to walk by on the path of science, letters, or noble manly life, and the morning comes on apace. The once powerful church, so sadly misnamed, which honours only the Christ of fiction, not yet the Jesus of fact, with her triple crown of nationalities—Greek, Latin, German—no longer sits the heir of all the ages, and the queen of civilization. Twice the ministers of this Ecclesiastical Institution have led the movements of the Western world. Once, when they felt the warm breath of that great Hebrew Peasant—a poor woman's child, cradled among the oxen at Bethlehem—and walking by the evening splendour reflected from his genius just gone down, all filled and inspired by the womanly comeliness and manly sublimity of his life, the apostles and martyrs—two by two, they wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in; hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted not, but went from one kingdom to another people, few in number and strangers in it, despised and rejected of men—they led the world with their austere piety and victorious confidence in God. Once again the Christian clergy, richly endowed, with studious men in their well-fed ranks, had a monopoly of superior education; they alone kept alive the torch of science, once lighted by that spark which Greek Prometheus had brought down from God; their garden alone escaped the barbaric flood, the new deluge, which so wasted all the world besides, and therein many a choice plant of ancient husbandry still grew, enriching its literary bloom with all the sweetness and mysterious meaning of ancient times; yea, new plants therein sprung up, by spontaneous generation from the all-quickening life of nature. Then the fathers and doctors—wide-browed, their tall heads worn with thought—they led the world; and as a symbol of their intellectual mastery, straightway sprang up new organizations of matter, the vast cathedrals of the Western world, those flowers of stone, the hanging gardens of the Latin Church, which still amaze the world, whereto the elements seemed moving 'neath the orphic impulse of creative mind. Then, too, came forth those priestly companies of monks and nuns—the master mind