Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/236

Rh great truths, is yet filled with a mass of most heinous superstition. I go away from all three to an enlightened, thoughtful man, and ask—"What doctrines, good sir, are most important to religion?" And he answers, "No doubt suck as produce the manliest and most natural life: to me, the infinite perfection of God, man's fitness for his duty and his destination, immortality, the religious value of daily life. Get all the truth you can, young man; have faith in your mind, your heart, your conscience, your soul. Religion is natural, whole, human life—right feeling, right thinking, right doing, right being."

What a difference in doctrines! All the sects say, "Believe in God!" But what an odds in the God they bid you believe! One is corn, the bread of life; the other is strychnine, the poison of death. In one place God is variable, ill-natured, revengeful; he will go into a minister's study, and confound him; into a minister's pulpit, and put a hook into his jaws so that he cannot preach. That is the God of Park-street theology.* In another he is the Father and Mother of all mankind, blessing the heathen, Hebrew, Catholic, Protestant, Christian, Gentile, sinner and saint: He is to be served with a life of daily duty, the normal use of every faculty he has given.

When I hear of a revival of religion, I always ask, what do they mean to revive? What feeling, what thinking, what doing, what being? Is it a religion that shall kill a boy; that shall stone a man to death for picking up sticks Saturday afternoon; that shall butcher a nation; crucify a prophet; talk gibberish; torture a woman for her opinion, and that opinion a true one ? Or is it a religion which will make me a better man, husband, brother, father, friend; a better minister, mechanic, president, street-sweeper, king—no matter what—a better man in any form?

Just now there is a "revival of religion," so called, going on in the land. The newspapers are full of it. Crowds of men and women throng the meeting-houses. They cannot get preaching enough. The poorer the article, the more they want of it. Speeches and sermons of the most extravagant character are made. Fanatical prayers are put up. Wonderful conversions are told of. The innermost secrets of men's and women's hearts are laid bare to