Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/262

Rh partly see and partly hear of. You must always allow for casualties. You cannot transfer a people from an old theology to a new one without some breakage and other harm and loss. This is attendant on all human operations. When about to build a meeting-house in the country, of old time, all the town's people came together, on a summer day, for the raising. The village brawler was there, idle boys, loungers, wrestlers, boxers. There was drinking, and swearing now and then. Many got a little hot with liquor. Now and then a spike-pole got crippled, two or three straw hats "perished everlastingly," Some brother was overtaken in a fault, and carried home boozy. But they pinned down the ridge-pole with shouting; all summer long the building was getting forward, the steeple grew up at last out from the tower it was rooted in; and in the autumn there was a harvest of people gathered within its walls, and generation after generation men went up there for prayers, and holy vows of noble life. Let us always make allowance for casualties, for extravagance, in the old which is fixed, in the new which will become so. What extravagances had the Quakers once, the Christians in Paul's time!

I say, we want a revival of religion, such as the world has not seen, yet often longed for. It was the dream even of the Hebrew prophets, looking for the time when the nations should learn war no more, when the sword should be turned into the ploughshare, the spear to the pruning-hook, when all men should be taught of God, when "Holiness unto the Lord" should be on the bells even of the horses. We want a piety so deep that men shall understand God made man from a perfect motive, of perfect material, for a perfect purpose, and endowed with faculties which are perfect means to that end; so deep, that we shall trust the natural law He writes on the body and in the soul. We want a morality so wide and firm, that men shall make the constitution of the universe the common law of all mankind; every day God's day,—life-time not to be let out to us at the sevenths or the seventieths, the larger fraction for wickedness, the lesser for piety and heaven, but the whole of it His, and the whole of it ours also, because we use it all as He meant it, for our good. Then the dwelling-house, the market-house, the court-