Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/213

this work—the greatest work of the most noble age—the servants of the Ecclesiastical Institutions can do little in their professional capacity. As religious men, they may do much; as "theological ministers," how little! True, there are noble ministers, worthiest followers of Jesus of Nazareth—nay, leaders far in advance of that Son of God, in the nineteenth century venturing where he never trod, nor could not step so long ago—who engage in all these noble deeds of humanity. But they are heretics, really, if not all plain to see! The mass of ministers—what do they care for the bondage of the slave, the degraded position of woman, for the vices of the age, which cheat man of his birthright? They can quote theology to prove them all virtues. It is their function to "baptize" men, or babies rather, to "convert" them to the popular theology, admit them to the church, to a dispensation of wine and bread in the meeting-house, and bury their bodies when dead ; not to humanize and elevate them to great manhood. With those five false theological ideas, what can thirty thousand ministers do? What they do! I find no peculiar fault with them; I pity far more than I blame—for I know too well how ecclesiastical education blinds the eye with thick bandages of old prejudice, and then is called "teaching man to see with the Spirit." The ecclesiastical minister is to alter the disposition of God, not that of man. He is to deal with the "original sin" inherited from "Adam," not the actual offences against natural law which originate with you and me. He is to help a few men out of hell; it is not lust, drunkenness, gaming, violence, idleness, theft, murder—vices of passion; it is not pride, vanity, covetousness, ambition, deceit, cruelty, and lust for power, and all the other vices of calculation, which cast men down; they are damned for the taint of Adam, "the fault of our general human nature," not for our personal misconduct as Emily and James. Adam's sin is the Cerberus of the Christian mythology; there in hades he crouches, keenly scenting the "guilt" of the "unredeemed," and with pitiless baying hounds them off to hell. The ecclesiastical minister is to help express a few lean and hungry souls to heaven; but the ticket demanded at that slow-yielding gate is not the golden branch plucked from the tree of life, planted, indeed, by God, but watered, tended, hus-