Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/177

Rh ing on his dim and perilous way? Once earthen roads wore the best we know, and horses’ foot had shoes of swiftness; now we need not, out of reverence, refine the iron road, the chariot and the steed of flame; nor out of irreverence need we spurn tho path our fathers trod; sorely bested and hunted after, tear-bedewed and travel-stained, they journeyed there, passing on to their God. If the mother that bore us were rover so rude, and to our eyes might seem never so graceless now, still she was our mother, and without her we should not have been born. Wives and children may men have, and manifold; each Christian Church has been the mother of us all; and though in her own dotage she deny our piety, and call us infidel, far be it from me to withhold the richly earned respect. Behind a decent veil, then, let us hide our mother's weakness, and ourselves pass on. Once piety built up a theocracy, and men say it was divine; now piety, everywhere in Christendom, builds up democracies; it is a diviner work.

The piety of this age must manifest itself in morality, and appear in a church where the priests are men of active mind and active hand; men of ideas, who commune with God and man through faith and works, finding no truth is hostile to their creed, no goodness foreign to their litany, no piety discordant with their psalm. The man who once would have built a convent and been its rigorous chief, now founds a temperance society, contends against war, toils for the pauper, the criminal, the madman, and the slave, for men bereft of senses and of sense. The synod of Dort and of Cambridge, the assembly of divines at Westminster, did what they could with what piety they had; they put it into decrees and platforms, into catechisms and creeds. But the various conventions for reform put their Siety into resolves and then into philanthropic works. I do not believe there has ever been an age when piety bore so large a place in the whole being of New England as at this day, or attendance on church-forms so small a part. The attempts made and making for a better education of the people, the lectures on science and literature abundantly attended in this town, the increased fondness for reading,