Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/171

Rh is the cause of tho controvesie." We "are now arriving such an extremity, that the axe is laid to the root of tho trees, and we are in imminent danger of perishing, if a speedy reformation of our provoking evils prevent it not." In 1702, Cotton Mather complains that " Our manifold indispositions to recover the dying power of godliness were successive calamities, under all of which our apostacies from that godliness have rather proceeded than abated." "The old spirit of New England has been sensibly going out of tho world, as the old saints in whom it was have gone; and, instead thereof, the spirit of the world, with a lamentable neglect of strict piety, has crept in upon the rising generation."

You go back to the time of the founders and fathers of the colony, and it is no better. In 1667, Mr. "Wilson, who had "a singular gift in the practice of discipline," on his death-bed declared, that " God would judge the people for their rebellion and self-willed spirit, for their contempt of civil and ecclesiastical rulers, and for their luxury and sloth; "and before that he said, people rise up as Corah, against their ministers." "And for our neglect of baptizing the children of the church, … I think God is Srovoked by it. Another sin I take to be the making light… of the authority of the synods." John Norton, whose piety was said to be " Grace, grafted on a crab-stock," in 1660, growled, after his wont, on account of the "Heart of New England, rent with the blasphemies of this generation." John Cotton, the ablest man in New England, who "liked to sweeten his mouth with a piece of Calvin, before he went to sleep," and was so pious that another could not swear while he was under the roof, mourned at "the condition of the churches;" and, in 1652, on his death-bed, after bestowing his blessing on the President of Harvard College, who had begged it of him, exhorted the elders to " Increase their watch against those declensions, which he saw the professors of religion falling into." In 1641, such was the condition of piety in