Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/258

Rh The great forces which in the last four hundred years have most powerfully and obviously helped this welfare and progress, may be reduced to two marked tendencies, which I will sum up in the form of ideas, and name the one Christianity and the other Democracy.

By Christianity, I mean that form of religion which consists of piety—the love of God, and morality—the keeping of His laws. That is not the Christianity of the Christian Church, nor of any sect ; it is the ideal religion which the human race has been groping after, if happily we might find it. It is yet only an ideal, actual in no society. By Democracy, I mean government over all the people by all the people, and for the sake of all. Of course, it is government according to the natural law of God, by justice, the point common to each man and all men, to each nation and all mankind, to the human race and to God. In a democracy, the people reign with sovereign power; their elected servants govern with delegated trust. There is national unity of action, represented by law; this makes the nation one, a whole; it is the centripetal force of society. But there is also individual variety of action, represented by the personal freedom of the people who ultimately make the laws; this makes John John, and not James, the individual a free person, discreet from all other men; this is the centrifugal force of society, which counteracts the excessive solidification that would else go on. Thus, by justice, the one and the many are balanced together, as the centripetal and centrifugal forces in the solar system.

This is not the democracy of the parties, but it is that ideal government, the reign of righteousness, the kingdom of justice, which all noble hearts long for, and labour to produce, the ideal whereunto mankind slowly draws near. No nation has yet come so close to it as the people of some of the Northern States, whe are yet far beneath ideals of government now known, that are yet themselves vastly inferior to others which mankind shall one day voyage after, discover, and annex to human possession.

In this Democracy, and the tendency towards it, two things come to all; namely, labour and government.