Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 1 (of 3)Parker, Theodore
Religion
Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 1 (of 3)
Parker, Theodore
Sermons, American; Unitarianism
At one extreme of society is a body called the rich, men who have
abundance, not a very numerous body, but powerful, first through the
energy which accumulates money, and secondly, through the money itself.
Then there is a body of men who are comfortable. This class comprises
the mass of the people in all the callings of life. Out of this class
the rich men come, and into it their children or grandchildren commonly
return. Few of the rich men of Boston were sons of rich men; still fewer
grandsons; few of them perhaps will be fathers of men equally rich;
still fewer grandfathers of such. Then there is the class that is
miserable. Some of them are supported by public charity, some by
private, some of them by their toil alone--but altogether they form a
mass of men who only stay in the world, and do not live in the best
sense of that word.
Such are the great divisions of society in respect to property. However,
the lines between these three classes are not sharp and distinctly
drawn. There are no sharp divisions in nature; but for our convenience,
we distinguish classes by their centre where they are most unlike, and
not by their circumference where they intermix and resemble each other.
The line between the miserable and comfortable, between the comfortable
and rich, is not distinctly drawn. The centre of each class is obvious
enough while the limits thereof are a dissolving view.
The poor are miserable. Their food is the least that will sustain
nature, not agreeable, not healthy; their clothing scanty and mean,
their dwellings inconvenient and uncomfortable, with roof and walls that
let in the cold and the rain--dwellings that are painful and unhealthy;
in their personal habits they are commonly unclean. Then they are
ignorant; they have no time to attend school in childhood, no time to
read or to think in manhood, even if they have learned to do either
before that. If they have the time, few men can think to any profit
while the body is uncomfortable. The cold man thinks only of the cold;
the wretched of his misery. Besides this they are frequently vicious. I
do not mean to say they are wicked in the sight of God. I never see a
poor man carried to jail for some petty crime, or even for a great one,
without thinking that probably, in God's eye, the man is far better than
I am, and from the State's prison or scaffold, will ascend into heaven
and take rank a great ways before me. I do not mean to say they are
wicked before God; but it is they who commit the minor crimes, against
decency, sobriety, against property and person, and most of the major
crimes, against human life. I mean that they commit the crimes that get
punished by law. They crowd your courts, they tenant your jails; they
occupy your gallows. If some man would write a book describing the life
of all the men hanged in Massachusetts for fifty years past, or tried
for some capital offence, and show what class of society they were from,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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