Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 2 (of 3)

by Theodore Parker

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 piety 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, the better class of books which are read—all these indicate an increased love of truth, the intellectual part of piety; societies for reform and for charity show an increase of the moral and affectional parts of piety; the better, the lovelier idea of God which all sects are embracing, is a sign of increased love of God. Thus all parts of piety are proving their existence by their work. The very absence from the churches, the disbelief of the old sour theologies, the very neglect of outward forms and ceremonies of religion, the decline of the ministry itself, under the present circumstances, shows an increase of piety. The baby-clothes were well and wide for the baby; now, the fact that he cannot get them on, shows plainly that he has outgrown them, is a boy and no longer a baby.

Once Piety fled to the Church as the only sanctuary in the waste wide world, and was fondly welcomed there, fed and fostered. When power fled off from the Church—"Wilt thou also go away?" said she; "Lord," said Piety, "to whom shall we go? Thou only hast the words of everlasting life." Once convents and cathedrals were what the world needed as shelter for this fair child of God; then she dwelt in the grim edifice that our fathers built, and for a time counted herself "lodged in a lodging where good things are." Now is she grown able to wander forth fearless and free, lodging where the night overtakes her, and doing what her hands find to do, not unattended by the Providence which hitherto has watched over and blessed her. I respect piety in the Hebrew saints, prophets, and bards, who spoke the fiery speech, or sung their sweet and soul-inspiring psalm:

"Out from the heart of Nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old."

I honor piety among the saints of Greece, clad in the form of philanthropy and art, speaking still in dramas, in philosophies, and song, and in the temple and the statue too:

"Not from a vain and shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought."

I admire at the piety of the Middle Ages, which founded the monastic tribes of men, which wrote the theologies, scholastic and mystic both, still speaking to the mind of men, or in poetic legends insinuated truth; which built that heroic architecture, overmastering therewith the sense and soul of man:

"The passive master lent his hand
To the vast Soul that o'er him planned:
And the same Power that reared the shrine,
Bestrode the tribes that knelt therein."

But the piety which I find now, in this age, here in our own land, I respect, honor, and admire yet more; I find it in the form of moral life; that is the piety I love, piety in her own loveliness. Would I could find poetic strains as fit to sing of her—but yet such

"Loveliness needs not the foreign aid of ornament,
But is, when unadorned, adorned the most."

Let me do no dishonor to other days, to Hebrew or to Grecian saints. Unlike and hostile though they were, they jointly fed my soul in earliest days. I would not underrate the mediæval saints, whose words and works have been my study in a manlier age; yet I love best the fair and vigorous piety of our own day. It is beautiful, amid the strong, rank life of the nineteenth century, amid the steam-mills and the telegraphs which talk by lightning, amid the far-reaching enterprises of our time, and 'mid the fierce democracies, it is beautiful to find this fragrant piety growing up in unwonted forms, in places where men say no seed of heaven can lodge and germinate. So in a June meadow, when a boy, and looking for the cranberries of another year, faded and tasteless, amid the pale but coarse rank grass, and discontented that I found them not, so I have seen the crimson arethusa or the cymbidium shedding an unexpected loveliness o'er all the watery soil and all the pale and coarse rank grass, a prophecy of summer near at hand. So in October, when the fields are brown with frost, the blue and fringed gentian meets your eye, filling with thankful tears.