Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/240

Rh Street church is the Oak Hall of the ecclesiastic business in slop clothing.

There is nothing more miraculous in the one case than in the other. Last year it did not succeed very well, for business was good, and men with full pockets were not to be scared with talk about hell. Now the commercial crisis makes it easy to act on men's fears. The panic in State-street, which ruined the warehouses, fills the meeting-houses to-day. If the black death raged in New Orleans, the yellow fever in Cincinnati, the plague in Philadelphia, the cholera in New York, the small-pox in Boston, the revival would be immensely greater than now. A Jesuit priest once said: "Seasons of pestilence are the harvest of ministers. Then men are susceptible to fear." Besides, you know what the newspapers have done. Last year the newspapers disgusted the public—the sensible part of the public—with the obscene details of a most unfortunate trial, for indecent and improper conduct. This year the same newspapers are crowded with gossip about the revival. The same motive was in either case. If they could turn a penny by the revival, they did it; if by adultery, they did that. They cared not from what quarter came the clean money.

Now, we are always to expect some extravagance in the action of a force so strong as this. Some good will be done by this movement. Let us do justice. 1. There are wicked men, who are only to be roused by fear. Some will be converted. The dread of hell is stronger than fear of the gallows. Some will be scared out of their ugly vice and crime. Certainly that is a good work. But it is only the men who commit the unpopular, small vices, that are converted. Such as do the heavy wickedness, those men are never converted, until they are too old for any sin except hypocrisy. Ask Mr Polk, ask Mr Clay, if you can reach into the other world, and they will tell you they understood that trick as well as all others. 2. Then there are weak men, who are not wicked, but who can be easily drawn into vice—gambling, drunkenness, licentiousness—some of them will be checked in their course, and become sober men, outwardly decorous. 3. Then there are unsettled men and women, who want a master to put his invasive, aggressive will, on them, and say they shall, or they shall