Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/56

52 enthusiasm and zeal spent in a single presidential election, were all turned to devise better means of educating the people—we cannot help thinking matters would soon wear a very different aspect.

One of two conclusions we must accept. Either God made man with desires that cannot be gratified on earth, and which yet are his best and most Godlike desires, and then man stands in frightful contradiction with all the rest of nature; or else it is possible for all the men and women of every class to receive a complete education of the faculties God gave them, and then the present institutions and opinions of society on this matter of education are all wrong, contrary to reason and the law of God. There are some good men, and religious men, doubtless, who think that in this respect matters can never be much mended, that the senses must always overlay the soul, the strong crush the weak, and the mass of men, who do all the work of the world, must ever be dirty and ignorant, and find little but toil and animal comfort, till they go where the servant is free from his master, and the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. These men represent the despair and the selfishness of society. If the same thing that has been must be; if the future must be just like the past; if falsehood and sin are eternal, and truth and goodness ephemeral creatures of to-day—then these men are right, and the sooner we renounce all hope of liberty, give up all love of wisdom, and call Christianity a lie—a hideous lie—why, the sooner the better. Let us never fear to look things in the face, and call them by their true names. But there are other men, who say the past did its work, and we will do ours. We will not bow to its idols, though they fell from the clouds; nor accept its limitations, though Lycurgus made poor provision, and Numa none at all, for the education of the people; we will not stop at its landmarks, nor construct ourselves in its image, for we also are men. While we take gratefully whatever past times bring us, we will get what we can grasp, and never be satisfied. These men represent the hope and the benevolence there is in man. If they are right, the truths of reason are not a whim; aspiration after perfection is more than a dream; Christianity not a lie, but