Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/204

200 sloop, a little slumber;" conservative and chilling, like ice, not creative, nor oven quickening, as water. It doffs to use and wont; has small confidence in human nature, much in a few facts of human history. It aims to stipe rate piety from goodness, her natural and heaven-appointed spouse, and marry her to bigotry, in joyless and unprofitable wedlock. The church does not load men to the deep springs of human nature, fed ever from tho far heights of toe Divine nature, whence flows that river of God, full of living water, where weary souls may drink perennial supply. While it keeps us from foiling back, it does little directly to advance mankind. In common with tho State, this priest and Levite pass by on the other side of the least developed classes of society, leaving the slave, the pauper, and tho criminal to their fate, hastening to strike hands with the thriving or the rich. These faults are shared in the main by all sects; some have them in the common, and some in a more eminent degree, but none is so distinguished from the rest as to need emphatic rebuke, or to deserve a special exemption from the charge. Such are the faults of the church of every land, and must be from the nature of the institution; like the State, it can only represent the average of mankind.

I am not speaking to clergymen, professional representatives of the church, not of the church as an ecclesiastical machine for keeping and extending certain opinions and symbols; not for an ecclesiastical purpose; I speak to teachers, for an educational purpose, of the church as an educational machine, one of the great forces for the spiritual development of the people.

The business of the land has also certain vices of its own; while it promotes the virtues I have named before, it does not tend to promote the highest form of character. It does not promote justice and humanity, as one could wish; it does not lead the employer to help the operative as a man, only to use him as a tool, merely for industrial purposes. The average merchant cares little whether his ship brings cloth ana cotton, or opium and rum. The average capitalist does not wish the stock of his manufacturing company divided into small shares, so that the