Theodore Parker

“ It is the sainthood and heroism of our day that toils for the ignorant, the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the wicked. Yes, it is our saints and heroes who fight fighting; who contend for the slave, and his master too, for the drunkard, the criminal; yes, for the wicked or the weak in all their forms. It is they that with weapons of heavenly proof fight the great battle for the souls of men. Though I detest war in each particular fibre of my heart, yet I honor the heroes among our fathers who fought with bloody hand; peace-makers in a savage way, they were faithful to the light ”

“ There are noble men in this city, who have been made philanthropic, by the sight of wrong, of intemperance, and poverty, and crime. Let mankind honor great conquerors, who only rout armies, and "plant fresh laurels where they kill;" I honor most the men who contend against misery, against crime and sin; men that are the soldiers of humanity, and in a low age, amidst the mean and sordid spirits of a great trading town, lift up their serene foreheads, and tell us of the right, the true, first good, first perfect, and first fair. ”

“ It is not the schools but the people's character that educates the child. Amid the trials, duties, dangers of your life, religion alone can guide you. It is not the world's eye that is on you, but God's; it is not the world's religion that will suffice you, but the religion of a Man, which unites you with truth, justice, piety, goodness; yes, which makes you one with God!
Young men and women—you can make this church a fountain of life to thousands of fainting souls. Yes, you can make this city nobler than city ever was before. A manly life is the best gift you can leave mankind ”

“ It is instructive to study this law of human progress, to see the De Gamas and Columbuses, aspiring men who dream of worlds to come and lead the perilous van; to see the Vespuccis, the Cortezes, the Pizarros, who get rank and fame by following in their track; to see next the merchant adventurers, soldiers, sutlers and the like, who make money out of the new conquest, while the great discoverers had for meet reward the joy of their genius, the nobleness of their work, a sight of the world's future welfare from the prophet's mountain—a hard life, a bad name, and a grave unknown. ”

“ Men will call us traitors: what then? That hurt nobody in '76! We are a rebellious nation; our whole history is treason; our blood was attainted before we were born; our creeds are infidelity to the mother-church; our Constitution treason to our father-land. What of that? Though all the governors in the world bid us commit treason against man, and set the example, let us never submit. Let God only be a master to control our conscience!
We can hold public meetings in favor of peace, in which what is wrong shall be exposed and condemned. ”

“ Every man who understands Christianity by heart, in its relations to man, to society, the nation, the world, knows that war is a wrong. At this day, with all the enlightenment of our age, after the long peace of the nations, war is easily avoided. Whenever it occurs, the very fact of its occurrence convicts the rulers of a nation either of entire incapacity as statesmen, or else of the worst form of treason; treason to the people, to mankind, to God! There is no other alternative. The very fact of an aggressive war shows that the men who cause it must be either fools or traitors. ”

“ Is it better for the State to kill a man in cold blood, than for me to kill my brother when in a rage? I cannot help thinking that the gallows and even the jail, as now administered, are practical teachers of violence and wrong! I cannot think it will always be so. Hitherto we have looked on criminals as voluntary enemies of mankind. We have treated them as wild beasts, not as dull or loitering boys. We have sought to destroy by death, to disable by mutilation or imprisonment, to terrify and subdue, not to convince, to reform, encourage, and bless. ”

“ No man has come with pious genius fit to conceive its litany, to chant its mighty creed, and sing its beauteous psalm. The church of America, the church of freedom, of absolute religion, the church of mankind, where Truth, Goodness, Piety, form one trinity of beauty, strength, and grace—when shall it come? Soon as we will. It is yours to help it come.
For these great works you may labor; yes, you are laboring, when you help forward justice, industry, when you promote the education of the people; when you practise, public and private, the virtues of a Christian man ”

“ But man is equal to all which God appoints for him. His desires are ever proportionate to his duty and his destinies. The strong cry of the nations for liberty, a craving as of hungry men for bread and water, shows what liberty is worth, and what it is destined to do. Allow freedom to think, and there will be truth; freedom to act, and we shall have heroic works; freedom to live and be, and we shall have love to men and love to God. The world's history proves that, and our own history. Jesus, our model-man, was the freest the world ever saw! ”

“ The crime and sin, foul, polluting and debasing all it touches, has come here to curse man and woman, the married and the single, and the babe unborn! It seems to me as if I saw the Genius of this city stand before God, lifting his hands in agony to heaven, crying for mercy on woman, insulted and trodden down, for vengeance on man, who treads her thus infamously into the dust. The vengeance comes, not the mercy. Misery in woman is the strongest inducement to crime. ”

“ To take one man's life is murder; what is it to practise killing as an art, a trade; to do it by thousands? Yet I think better of the hands that do the butchering than of the ambitious heads, the cold, remorseless hearts, which plunge the nation into war.
In war the State teaches men to lie, to steal, to kill. It calls for privateers, who are commonly pirates with a national charter, and pirates are privateers with only a personal charter. Every camp is a school of profanity, violence, licentiousness, and crimes too foul to name. It is so without sixty-five thousand gallons of whiskey. ”

“ But can she buy the people of the North? Is honesty gone, and honor gone, your love of country gone, religion gone, and nothing manly left; not even shame? Then let us perish; let the Union perish! No, let that stand firm, and let the Northern men themselves be slaves; and let us go to our masters and say, "You are very few, we are very many; we have the wealth, the numbers, the intelligence, the religion of the land; but you have the power, do not be hard upon us; pray give us a little something, some humble offices, or if not these at least a tariff, and we will be content." ”

“ Let them see your goodness, justice, Christianity. The age demands of you a development of religion proportionate with the vigor of your mind and arms. Trade is silently making a wonderful revolution. We live in the midst of it, and therefore see it not. All property has become movable, and therefore power departs from the family of the first-born, and comes to the family of mankind. God only controls this revolution, but you can help it forward, or retard it. The freedom of labor, and the freedom of trade, will work wonders little dreamed of yet; one is now uniting all men of the same nation ”

“ It is so in the nation, a few great men bearing the brunt of the storm, and wading through the surges to set their weaker brothers, screaming and struggling, with dry feet, in safety, on the firm land of science or religion. It is so in the world, a tall nation achieving art, science, law, morals, religion, and by the fact revealing their beauty to the barbarian race. ”

“ State offers to the poor wretches it trained up to be criminals, stands there, a sign of our infamy, and while it lifts its horrid arm to crush the life out of some miserable man, whose blood cries to God against Cain in the nineteenth century, it lifts that same arm as an index of our shame.
Is that all? Oh, no! Did not Jesus say, resist not evil—with evil? Is not war the worst form of that evil; and is there on earth a nation so greedy of war; a nation more reckless of provoking it; one where the war-horse so soon conducts his foolish rider into fame and power? ”

“ Poverty cannot touch them. Let the mothers who bore them rejoice, but weep only for those that are left—left to ignorance, to misery, to intemperance, to vice that I shall not name; left to the mercies of the jail, and perhaps the gallows at the last. Yet Boston is a Christian city—and it is eighteen hundred years since one great Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost! ”

“ Every despotism is established and sustained by war. This is the foundation of all the aristocracies of the old world, aristocracies of blood. Our famous men are often ashamed that their wealth was honestly got by working, or peddling, and foolishly copy the savage and bloody emblems of ancient heraldry in their assumed coats of arms, industrious men seeking to have a griffin on their seal! Nothing is so hostile to a true democracy as war. It elevates a few, often bold, bad men, at the expense of the many, who pay the money and furnish the blood for war. ”

“ The talent of the North is blinded, deafened, gagged with its own cotton. The North clamored loudly when the nation's treasure was removed from the United States Bank; it is almost silent at the annexation of a slave territory big as the kingdom of France, encumbered with debts, loaded with the entailment of war! Northern Governors call for soldiers; our men volunteer to fight in a most infamous war for the extension of slavery! Tell it not in Boston, whisper it not in Faneuil Hall, lest you weaken the slumbers of your fathers, and they curse you as cowards and traitors unto men! ”

“ It is no hard thing to reason with reasoning men, and be intelligible to the intelligent; to talk acceptably and even movingly to scholars and men well read, is no hard thing if you are yourself well read and a scholar. But to be intelligible to the ignorant, to reason with men who reason not, to speak acceptably and movingly with such men, to inspire them with wisdom, with goodness and with piety, that is the task only for some men of rare genius who can stride over the great gulf betwixt the thrones of creative power, and the humble positions of men ignorant, poor and forgot! ”

“ It seems to me that a church which dares name itself Christian, the Church of the Redeemer, which aspires to be a true church, must set itself about all this business, and be not merely a church of theology, but of religion; not of faith only, but of works; a just church by its faith bringing works into life. It should not be a church termagant, which only peevishly scolds at sin, in its anile way; but a church militant against every form of evil, which not only censures, but writes out on the walls of the world the brave example of a Christian life, that all may take pattern therefrom. ”

“ He looked not back, as the Pharisee, save for illustrations and examples. He looked forward for his direction. He looked around for his work. There it lay, the harvest plenteous, the laborers few. It is always so. He looked not to men for his idea, his word to speak; as little for their applause. He looked in to God, for guidance, wisdom, strength, and as water in the wilderness, at the stroke of Moses, in the Hebrew legend, so inspiration came at his call, a mighty stream of truth for the nation, faint, feeble, afraid, and wandering for the promised land ”

“ There is no remedy for this evil and its kindred but keeping the laws of God; in one word, none but Christianity, goodness, and piety felt in the heart, applied in all the works of life, individually, socially, and politically. While educated and abounding men acknowledge no rule of conduct but self-interest, what can you expect of the ignorant and the perishing? While great men say without rebuke that we do not look at "the natural justice of a war," do you expect men in the lowest places of society, ignorant and brutish, pinched by want, to look at the natural justice of theft, of murder? ”

“ The Cambridge men retreat, they run, they fly. The houses burn. You see the churches and the colleges go up, a stream of fire. That library—founded amid want and war and sad sectarian strife, slowly gathered by the saving of two centuries, the hope of the poor scholar, the boast of the rich one—is scattered to the winds and burnt with fire, for the solid granite is blasted by powder, and the turrets fall. Victory is ours. Ten thousand men of Cambridge lie dead; eight thousand of Boston. ”