Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/218

Rh trust of immortality; the American politician's scornful denial of any law of God above the lowest lusts of the profligate or the most cruel calculations of the madly ambitious, and the American ministers' cowardly assent thereto; the fact that all reformers who mean the people's good find readiest and longest-continued opposition from the church; the added fact that great masses of sober, thoughtful, moral and religous men and women—farmers, traders, mechanics, scholars too—have no faith in the popular theology, attend meeting only on sufferance, while the minister himself has no confidence in the "foolishness of his preaching," which is not weighty with argument, but only heavy with routine, knows not what to say, and abandons speech on all which touches daily life or a nation's work;—all this shows that the Ecclesiastical Institutions of Christendom do not, nay, cannot lead the religious man who could know God and love Him too ; cannot even scare the trader in wickedness who has set his heart on pleasure, office, gold, and power, nor fright the glutton from his beastly lust! The established church of France and England dares not rebuke a governmental sin. In the land of Luther the king is the minister, a German Pope ecclesiastic, all free speech flies even from his colleges, and dwells with " Atheists." The British Bishops are less religious than the "Manchester school of politicians" in the House of Commons; are ever at war with human nature. In 1850, and ever since, you saw how deep this rottenness had forced its way into the American Churches. Even the Senate was outdone in practical atheism; it was the pulpit would send its mother into bondage for ever! But what then? Truth has not perished!

No doubt these are times of great danger, and those who have always leaned on the crutch of authority will find it hard to stand when that crutch is broken. But the child