Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/321

308 froth is to the sea,—the scum it genders in chafing with the world; ambition, the excessive love of power; covetousness, the intemperate love of money: these often make a dreadful ruin of a man. How many wealthy wrecks do I see, floating all the week in the streets, and drifted, perhaps, for an hour into some meeting-house of a Sunday. A man may be a millionnaire in dollars, and yet a bankrupt in manhood. Bears and frogs and various other creatures hybernate a part of every year; they lay still, seemingly unconscious; their powers all live, but the functions are suspended; nothing is wholly dead, all is sleeping. How many men do I know, who undergo a partial hybernation, and that for long years! Their conscience has "denned up," as the bears in winter, their humanities are all torpid as the frogs who now lie buried in the mud. Yet these men walk about, all their higher faculties winter-quartered in their heart. Men salute them, "Good morning, sir! a happy new year!" They sit on platforms and are called by honourable names. Ministers preach to those hybernal souls as vainly as to a winter congregation of Russian bears. Nay, worse; hybernant ministers hold forth to a hybernating pack of "worshippers." So, in the catacombs of Egypt, you shall find the ancient priest amid his ancient congregation, mummies all.

A few years ago, in Boston, an ambitious religious society built a meeting-house more costly than they could pay for, or keep; so they were forced to leave it; the steeple turned the church out of doors. I never knew but one instance of this kind. Societies are wiser. But how often do I find that some respectable vice—covetousness, vanity, or ambition — has turned the man out of his own body. Politics have twisted that man's neck; fine dress exposes the shame of this civilized Adam and Eve, so fearfully clothed, that they are not ashamed while they yet for ever seek to hide themselves from the presence of the Lord God, always walking in every garden, at the cool or the heat of day, with eyes that travel through eternity. Here the shop unhouses the man ; this is crushed by an avalanche of domestic goods; and this has bottled his soul along with his drink : there the pulpit, with its snow-white halter, chokes the life out of the minister. Zeal for