Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/256

Rh to all eternity. Man cannot remove it; God will not; for He loves none but church members, who believe the church theology; He will ruin all else;—and damned for once is damned for evermore.

Hence ministers in churches do not make it a principal thing to try and remove these evils, to develope man's nature, to set the religious faculty, that greatest river of God, to turn the mills of society. They aim chiefly to remove unbelief in ecclesiastical doctrines, to admit men to the church, to save their souls from the wrath of God by belief in the magic of atonement. "No man," say they, "goes into heaven for his religion, for any merit of his own; with a whole life of piety and morality, ended in the cruelest martyrdom, he cannot buy a ticket of entrance;" while a moment's belief in the ecclesiastic theology, and joining of a church, will admit a pirate, a kidnapper, a deceitful politician who curses a nation, or a hypocritical priest—it will admit them all to heaven—each man as a "dead-head."

Do you doubt that the churches of America count not manly religious character and life, but only theological belief, as the one thing needful?—then look at these two facts.

First, the Protestant churches of America have one great corporation—the Tract Society—wherein many sects work together. The aim is theological—to enforce ecclesiastic doctrines;—it is not religious—to promote love to God, and the keeping of his natural laws writ in the very constitution of man. So the Tract Society protests against none of the great evils I have named. It attacks no popular wickedness; it would save men from the fancied wrath of God by faith in Christ; not by virtue and wisdom save them from actual ignorance, superstition, covetousness, drunkenness, dishonesty. It would save men in their sins hereafter, not from their sins to-day and here. It has little to say against war, political oppression, slavery, the antagonism of society, the degradation of woman. Even the Bible Society, in which all sects unite, dares not give the New Testament to a single slave, though the American Anti-Slavery Society offer them five thousand dollars if they will spend it thus. Spite of its profession, spite of its good intention, the church is baptized