Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/271

258 but the appetite may be perverted and misdirect the individual, so that he eats and drinks things not fit for him, or uses them in excessive quantity, and is poisoned by what should feed him. Look about you at the terrible examples of each form of error,—gluttons who have "eaten their own heads off," thinking no more than the swine they feed upon and resemble; drunkards who have drowned themselves in the Red Sea of their own debauchery, the Pharaohs of intemperance, their nobler faculties strangled long before their flesh is cold I The religious faculty—call it soul—may err as much as the appetite for food, and the mistake produce consequences not less hideous on the individual and the nation. A church may poison the soul with foul doctrines as easily as a grog shop may poison the body with foul drink.

The animals are all unprogressive in their character; but little room is left them for individual will or reflection. Their action is almost all spontaneous, instinctive, compulsory of their organization, not free of their individual personality. Hence they are tools of a power which works through them, rather than agents acting on their own account. So they do not err in choice of food or drink, or mode of conduct. If an individual does so, no tribe of animals ever makes that mistake. They grow no wiser by experiment, they suffer from none, for they try none. But God has made man—within certain and somewhat narrow limits—his own master. We are progressive, and must make experiments in the art of life. Instinct is the sole and perfect guide for the beast, representing not his thought, but God's thought for him. But man is partly ruled by instinct, which is God's thought, and partly must he rule himself by his own personal reflective will. After he gets beyond the wildness of his primitive state, the reflective action is much more than the instinctive. He makes great errors in his experiments. Individuals do so. John is a drunkard; Lewis and Margaret are dandies; both come to nothing, one but a cup of drink, the others a bundle of fine clothes. Nations likewise do so: the Swedes are a people of drunkards; the Greeks and Romans were debased by the vices of their civilization, and barbarous, half-naked men tore these effeminate dandies limb from limb.