Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/243

230 other craft that keeps the intellectual sea. The people mean to have a revival of religion, just as the Italians and the French in their revolution, meant liberty, equal rights, democracy. The people mean a revival of religion; but the ministers will turn it to a revival of the ecclesiastic theology—the doctrine of the dark ages, which we ought to have cast behind us centuries ago.

A real revival of religion—it was never more needed. Why are men and women so excited now? Why do they go to the meeting-houses, and listen to doctrines that insult the common sense of mankind? They are not satisfied with their religious condition. They feel their want. "They are as sheep having no shepherd." This movement shows how strong is the religious faculty in man. In the name of democracy, politicians use the deep, patriotic feeling of the people to destroy the best institutions of America and the world; and in the name of God, ministers use this mightiest religious feeling to impose on us things yet more disastrous. Let you and me remember that religion is wholeness, not mutilation; that it is life, and not death; that it is service with every limb of this body, every faculty of this spirit; that we are not to take the world on halves with God, or on sevenths, giving him only the lesser fraction, and taking the larger ourselves: it is to spread over and consecrate the whole life, and make it divine.

Let you and me remember this. How much can we do,—a single man, a single noble woman,—with that life of natural religion! He who goes through a land and scatters blown roses may be tracked next day by their withered petals that strew the ground; but he who goes through it and scatters rose seed, a hundred years after leaves behind him a land full of fragrance and beauty for his monument, and as a heritage for his daughters and his sons. So let you and me walk through life that we shall sow the seeds of piety and of morality, to spring up fair as these blossoms at my side, and rich as the bread which is food for all the nations of mankind.