Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/265

252 lanthropic love! What if all the thirty thousand Protestant ministers, and the two thousand Catholic priests, in the United States, had such religion—worked with such theological ideas of man, God, duty, destination! There would never be another war, staining America with blood; filibustering would be impossible; political oppression, it would not continue a week, the people would not choose a magistrate in the day time whom they must hire watchers to sit up and look after all night, lest he do mischief; a wicked ruler would be as impossible as a ghost in the day time. Slavery would end before the fourth of July, and on Independence day, the mayor of the city might tell the rear-admiral of the Turks, "My dear sir, we are converted, and as good as African Mahommedans, and there is not a slave in all the United States. Boston has become almost as Christian as Tunis or Algiers!" What a change would come over the structure of society! Co-operative industry would take the place of selfish antagonism. How would that flower of womanhood expand with fairer, sweeter, and more prophetic bloom! How would the nation's wealth increase! What education of all—what welfare now, what progress for the future! What a generation of sons and daughters would this people raise up! Ay, what missionaries should we send abroad, not to preach ignorance to the heathen, who have enough of it already, but to carry the light of the gospel of life to the nations that "sit in darkness and in the shadow of death!"

Such a revival of religion—it is possible; one day it will be actual. The ideal in my heart is a prophecy of the real in mankind's actual life. At length the best must be; this is as sure as that God is good. But this revival will not come by miracle. God dues his part by creating us with faculties fit for this glorious destination ; by providing us in the material world, the best means to achieve that destination and get this development. To use these powers and opportunities, it is not God's work, it is yours and mine. There never was a miracle, there never will be. Trust me, what God for once makes right, he will never unmake into wrong.

This revival of religion will not come by prayer of words, although the thirty thousand Protestant ministers and the