Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/217

204 All the great world-sects have done service to mankind; each of the three still living—Buddhistic, Christian, Mohammedan—is of value still. Not a Christian sect but has yet some work to do—rears a little herb, else neglected, or picks a crumb which falls from mankind's table, whence even the fragments must be gathered up and nothing lost. The dreadful theology I have spoken of—nay, the five false ideas therein, though the most ghastly errors of human consciousness—have still been of service to the world. He maketh the wrath of man to praise Him! What grim laws of our fathers' day went before the humane legislation of their sons! What wars once reddened the land where now but peaceful cities stand ! Productive industry—the slave is father of that swarthy queen! Astrology and alchemy were once the sciences which filled the ablest heads of Europe. Without these there had been no Leibnitz and Newton, no Humboldt and La Place. Let us do no injustice to the wild-man, without garments for his limbs, or language for his baby thoughts. Abraham, in the mystic story, could faithfully offer up his son a human sacrifice to his conception of a blood-devouring deity. Let us honour ancient fidelity ; when mankind was a child he thought as a child! Nay, let us be patient with men whom defect of nature, or the perversion of their schooling, makes fit to think such sacrifice could ever be commanded by the God who made the world. Chide not the slow march of the red man in the woods, his captive wife bearing his burthens on her feeble back; mock not at his little cockle of bark which barely skims a stream, while our railroad train, on our iron tracks, a town of people in its arms, drives through the land with more than windy speed; or, while our ship, propelled by steam, can beara burthen of many a hundred tons, and front all the fierceness of the Atlantic sea. By the errors of our fathers, yea, brothers, let us, in all humility, be taught. Allow all the service which the Christian church has done—nay, more, still does; yet her day of power is long since gone by. The open and professed atheism of a few scientific men, who think they think there is no God; the wide-spread doubt of thoughtful men, who are not certain of any conscious mind which plans the world and so insures the destination of mankind; the half-acknowledged dis-