Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/167

Rh be despaired of; is not yet in a "decline," and past all hope of recovery. Is the age wanting in piety, which makes such efforts as those? Yes, you will say, because it does no more. I agree to this; but it is rich in piety compared in other time? Ours is an age of faith; not of mere belief in the commandments of men, but of faith in the nature of man and the commandments of God. This prevailing and contagious complaint about the decline of religion is not one of the new things of our time. In the beginning of the last century, Dr. Colman, first minister of the church in Brattle Street, lamented in small capitals over the general decline of piety:—"The venerable name of religion and of the church is made a sham pretence for the worst of villanies, for uncharitableness and unnatural oppression of the pious and the peaceable;" "the perilous times are some, wherein men are lovers only of their own selves." "Ah! calamitous day," says he, "into which we are fallen, and into which the sins of our infatuated age hive brought us!" He looks back to the founders of New England; they "were rich in faith, and heirs of a better world " men of whom the world was not worthy;" "they laid in a stock of prayers for us which have brought down many blessings on us already." Samuel Willard bewailed "the chequered state of the gospel church;" it was "in every respect a gloomy day, and covered with thick clouds."

We retire yet further back, to the end of the seventeenth century; a hundred and sixty or seventy years ago, Dr, Increase Mather, not only in his own pulpit, but also at "the great and Thursday lecture," lamented over "the degeneracy and departing glory of New England." He complained that there was a neglect of the Sabbath, of the ordinances, and of family worship; he groaned at the lax discipline of the churches, and looked, says another, "as fearfully on the growing charity as on the growing vices of the age." He called the existing generation " an unconverted generation." "Atheism and profaneness," says he, "have come to a prodigious height;" "God will visit" for these things; "God is about to open the windows of heaven, and pour down the cataracts of His wrath ere this generation … is passed away." If a comet appeared in the sky, it was to admonish men of the visitation, and