Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/238

Rh men. They cannot do it, with their ecclesiastic idea and method of making doctrines. The machinery will not do; and they say it is Divine machinery, and cannot be improved. But they want to force the old article they have got on the popular market. Once they could do so; for once ministers were commonly taken from the ablest men in the country; now, well nigh from the feeblest. Once they had the best education. Once none but ministers had any considerable literary and scientific culture. Then talent and culture on the church's side, could do the ecclesiastic work. Now it rarely happens that the minister is the best born man, or the best bred man, in his parish. In some cases there are hundreds, and in many there are ten before him. A strong woman can throw the minister, in the close wrestling of debate. He cannot argue down his opponents and reason them into a belief in his terrible idea of a God who damns babies newly born. But the minister can do something else. He controls the ecclesiastic machinery, and deals directly with the religious element in man—the strongest, and perhaps, also, the most easily moved. So he appeals to religious fear, and tries to scare men into belief of his doctrines, and membership of his church. He has no effect on great sinners, fraudulent bankers, fraudulent presidents of incorporated companies, lying governors, presidents, representatives; he has much on weak men. Attempts at revivals are no new things—the experiment has often been tried. A few winters ago some Unitarians tried it in Boston, but they toiled all winter, and caught nothing—enclosing nothing but a few sprats and minnows, who ran out through the broad meshes of their net, before it could be hauled into their boat. Other ministers, who are the wisest and the most religious part of that valuable sect, would have nothing to do with it. Different men went in, false to their idea of theology—with the best intentions, no doubt. It was a strange spectacle, that attempt to build up the ecclesiastic Unitarian pyramid in that way! It was a worse task than that of the Israelites in Egypt—not to make bricks without straw, but with nothing else! Those men who undertook to make a hot-house of religion and force Christians under the Unitarian glass, were so cold in their religious temperament that any one of them