Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/202

198 character ceases to be private, and becomes a public force in the education of the people.

The churches have the same faults as the State. There is the same postponement of justice and preference of force; the same neglect of the law of God in their seal for the statutes of men; tho same crouching to dollars or to numbers. However, in the churches these faults appear negatively, rather than as an affirmation. The worldliness of the church is not open, self-conscious, and avowed; it is not, as a general thing, that human in justice is openly defended, but rather justice goes by default. But if the churches do not positively support and teach injustice, as the State certainly does, they do not teach the opposite, and, be far as that goes, are allies of tho State in its evil influence The fact that the churches, as such, did not oppose the war, and do not oppose Slavery, its continuance or its extension—nay, that there are often found its apologists and defenders, seldom its opponents; that they not only pervert the sacred books of the Christians to its defence, but wrest the doctrines of Christianity to justify it; the fact that they cannot, certainly do not, correct the particularism of the political parties, the love of wealth in one, of mere majorities in the other; that they know no patriotism not bounded by their country, none co-extensive with mankind; that they cannot resist the vice of party spirit—these are real proofs that the church is but the ally of the State in this evil influence. But the church has also certain specific faults of its own. It teaches injustice by continually referring to the might of God, not His justice; to His ability and will to damn mankind, not asking if He has the right? It teaches that in virtue of His infinite power, He is not amenable to infinite justice and to infinite love. Thus, while the State teaches, in the name of expediency and by practice, that the strong may properly be the tyrants of the weak, the mighty nation over the feeble, the strong race over the inferior, that the Government may dispense with right at home and abroad—the church, as theory in Christ's name, teaches that God may repudiate His own justice and His own love.

The churches have little love of truth, as such, only of