Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/317

304 as a guide-board to the slave. But let not this identity of name make yon and me for a moment doubt the od s between such opposites.

A bigoted minister, superstitious, ignorant of God and man and true religion, spiteful, and yet devout, hanging a Quaker woman because she believes in the free inspiration of the human soul; a thoughtful wife, trusting in God, loving her children and their father, ruling her household with discretion, industry, religious love, and living kindly toward all mankind,—what an odds there is betwixt the two! Yet he values his religion as much as she. So the filthiest squaw who rots in her California subterranean den values her mode of life as highly as Von Humboldt the science that he learns and sends abroad to bless the world.

Against the false form of religion I have spoken, perhaps, less than I should, but certainly far more than I would, for I never think of it without a shudder at the ghastly horrors it has produced, and still sows the world withal.

All round me do I see its wicked work; for as the forehead of a groaning man is grimly wrinkled by the bitter draughts he swallows through mistake, whereat his palate quivers still, and his throat turns rough while the poison begins to work him fatal ill below—so with earnest and self-denying believers of those bitter doctrines which they too have swallowed also by mistake, do their sad looks, distorted mouth, belittled brow, their doleful voice and ghastly prayers, attest the unkindness of that religion which so wars against the soul. It is this odious thing Which has been opposed, hated, and scorned by some of the most philosophical and humane men who ever lived. They spoke against that religion whose emotion is fear and despair before God, and hate before men; whose ideas are that man is a worm, and God a great ugly boot, lifted up to tread him down with endless crush of misery; whose actions are unmanly, unjust, and wicked, watering the earth with blood, and sowing it with seeds of woe. It is against these things that Grecian Epicurus, and Lucretius the Roman, his pupil, heathens both, with many more, waged a continual war; it is against false religion that many a noble man and woman since have lifted up their voices, and won a bad name in the Christian church,