Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/241

228 not. They will find a master. It is true they will shrink and shrivel, and dry up. But they want a master, and finding one, they will grow no more, and be tormented no more. Ceasing to think, they will cease to doubt; and where they have made a solitude, they will call it the peace of Christ.

1. But the evil very far surpasses the good. Many men, well born, well educated, will turn off with disgust from real religion. They will become more selfish, more worldly, proud, heartless, hostile to every effort for human progress,—with no faith in God, none in man, none in immortality, none in conscience,—their lives devoted to the lower law. Many of them will be church members, for the actual atheist of to-day is cunninger than ever before, and entrenches himself within the church. There is no fortress like a pew against the ecclesiastic artillery. Such a revival will make more men of this stamp. They are the greatest obstacles to the community's progress. It is not drunkards, it is not thieves, it is not common brawlers, who most hinder the development of mankind. It is the sleek, comfortable men, outwardly decorous, but inwardly as rotten as a grave that is filled with the contents of a fever hospital.

2. Then, others who were brought into the churches full of zeal, full of resolution, they will be cursed by the theology they accept, and will be stunted in their mental, moral, affectional, and religious growth—most of all in their religious. For with the idea of God, that he is an ugly devil, of man, that he is a sinful worm, and of religion, that it is an unnatural belief in what reason, conscience, heart, and soul cry out against, what true, manly piety can there be? Fear takes the place of religion, and that ugly carrion crow drives off all the handsome birds of paradise, bringing the olive-branch in their beaks.

To me, in the revival itself, there is much that is encouraging. I shall speak of it next Sunday. In the conduct of it, there is much profoundly melancholy. The effect of the misconduct on the people is most deplorable. What an idea of God is offered to man! Can any one love such a God? Surely not. I do not wonder men and women go mad. The idea of Christ—what blasphemy against that noble man, who said, religion is love of God