Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/274

Rh no Methodist has had a European reputation. I do not know of an American Methodist, more than American Catholic, who is eminent for anything but devotion for his church. Yet there is talent enough born into the Methodist church; it affects powerfully the poorest and least educated class of men in the Northern States, who furnish able men for its preachers. When the Methodist synod met in Boston a few years ago we were astonished to see such a collection of superior heads; they would average better than any American legislature I have seen. Everybody knows what zeal, what industry, what self-denial there are in the sect. Yet little comes of all this talent, because the theology and the discipline of the sect crush all free individuality of mind, conscience, heart, and soul. Just in proportion as a man becomes thoroughly a Methodist, he ceases to be an individual man with a free mind, a free conscience, free affections, and freedom of soul; instead thereof he becomes a vulgar fraction of his sect, one twelve-millionth part of the Methodist church. Not many years since a Methodist preacher said, "We preach religion without philosophy, and that is the secret of our success." He meant that they proclaimed doctrines which must be believed without appeal to reason, and commanded deeds to be done without regard to conscience: The consequence is that men with large reason and conscience either will not enter the Methodist church at all, or if they do, they thence presently come out, or stay only to have their minds pinched to the narrowest compass, and their conscience stifled stone dead.

There is one method which has been adopted by all the Christian sects in their theological investigations. Some, like the Methodists and Catholics, and most of the Trinitarians, adhere to it with all their might; others, like the English church, the Unitarians, the Universalists, and the Lutherans, care less for it, and break away in practice from what they all profess in theory. I call this the ecclesiastical method.

There is another method adopted by philosophical men in their scientific investigations in these days, but rejected by all the great sects; some earnestly and violently repu-