Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/94

Rh out of the Bible, it was the book of the people, the New Testament, written much of it in the interest of all mankind, with special emphasis laid on the rights of the weak and the duties of the strong. Good things got said in sermon and in prayer. The speakers must think, the hearers think, as well as tremble. Begin to think in a circle narrow as a lady's ring, or the Assembly's Catechism, you will think out; for thought, like all movement, tends to the right line. Calvinism has always bred thinkers, and when barbarism was the first danger was perhaps the only thing which could do it. Calvinism, too, has always shown itself in favour of popular liberty to a certain degree, and though it stops far short of the mark, yet goes far beyond the Catholic or Episcopalian.

Sunday, thus enforced by superstition, has yet been the education-day of New England; the national school-time for the culture of man's highest powers; therein have the clergy been our educators, and done a vast service which mankind will not soon forget. It was good seed they sowed on this soil of the New World; the harvest is proof of that. They builded wiser than they knew. Their unconscious hands constructed the thought of God. Even their superstition and bigotry did much to preserve church and clergy to us; much also to educate and develop the highest powers of man. But for that superstition we might have seen the same anarchy, the same unbridled license in the seventeenth century, which we saw in the eighteenth, as a consequence of a similar revolution, a similar reaction; only it would have been carried out with the intensity of that most masculine and earnest race of men. How much further English atrocities would have gone than the French did go; how long it would have taken mankind, by their proper motion, to reascend from a fall so adverse and so low, I cannot tell. I see what saved them from the plunge.

True, the Sunday was not what it should be, more than the week; preaching was not what it should be, more than practice. But without that Sunday, and without that preaching, New England would have been a quite different land; America another nation altogether; the world by no means so far advanced as now. New England with her descendants has always been the superior portion of