Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/163

Rh peared that morals were in a low state hero when compared with the ideal morals of Christianity. Now, as the outward deed is but tho manifestation of the inward life, and objective humanity tho index of subjective divinity, so the low state of morals proves a low stato of piety; if the heart of this town was right towards God, then would its hand also be right towards man. I am one of those who for long years have lamented the want of vital piety in this people. We not only do not realize spiritual things, but we do not make them our ideals. I see proofs of this want of piety in tho low morals of trade, of the public press; in poverty, intemperance, and crime; in the vices and social wrongs touched on the last Sunday. I judge the tree by its fruit. But it is not on this ground that the ecclesiastical complaint is based. Men who make so much ado about the absence of piety, do not appeal for proof thereof to the great vices and prominent sins of the times; they see no sign of that in our trade and our politics; in the misery that festers in, putrid lanes, one day to breed a pestilence, which it were even cheaper to hinder i»ow, than cure at a later time; nobody mentions as proof the Mexican war, the political dishonesty of officers, the rapacity of office-seekers, the servility of men who will tamely suffer the most sacred rights of three millions of men to be trodden into the dust. Matters which concern millions of men came up before your Congress; the great senator of Massachusetts loitered away the time of the session here in Boston, managing a lawsuit for a few thousand dollars, and no fault was publicly found with such neglect of public duty; but men see no lack of piety indicated by this fact, and others like it; they find signs of that lack in empty pews, in a deserted communion-table, in the fact that children, though brought up to reverence truth and justice, to love man and to love God, are not baptized with water; or in the fact that Unitarianism or Trinitarianism is on the decline! How many waitings have we all heard, or read, because the Puritan churches of Boston have not kept the faith of their grim founders; what lamentations at the rising up of a sect which refuses the doctrine of the Trinity, or at the appearance of a few men who, neglecting the common props of Christianity, rest it, for its basis, on the nature of man and the nature of God: though almost