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
I think something will be done in Europe for the organization of labor,
I do not know what; I do not know how; I have not the ability to know;
and will not pretend to criticize what I know I cannot create, and do
not at present understand. I think there will be a great change in the
form of society; that able men will endeavor to remove the causes of
crime, not merely to make money out of that crime; that intemperance
will be diminished; that idleness in rich or poor will be counted a
disgrace; that labor will be more respected; education more widely
diffused; and that institutions will be founded, which will tend to
produce these results. But I do not pretend to devise those
institutions, and certainly shall not throw obstacles in the way of such
as can or will try. It seems likely that something will be first done in
Europe, where the need is greatest. There a change must come. By and by,
if it does not come peaceably, the continent will not furnish "special
constables" enough to put down human nature. If the white republicans
cannot make a revolution peacefully, wait a little, and the red
republicans will make it in blood. "Peaceably if we can, forcibly if we
must," says mankind, first in a whisper, then in a voice of thunder. If
powerful men will not write justice with black ink, on white paper,
ignorant and violent men will write it on the soil, in letters of blood,
and illuminate their rude legislation with burning castles, palaces and
towns. While the social change is taking place never so peacefully, men
will think the world is going to ruin. But it is an old world, pretty
well put together, and, with all these changes, will probably last some
time longer. Human society is like one of those enormous boulders, so
nicely poised on another rock, that a man may move it with a single
hand. You are afraid to come under its sides, lest it fall. When the
wind blows, it rocks with formidable noise, and men say it will soon be
down upon us. Now and then a rude boy undertakes to throw it over, but
all the men who can get their shoulders under, cannot raise the
ponderous mass from its solid and firm-set base.
Still, after all these changes have taken place, there remains the
difference between the strong and the weak, the active and the idle, the
thrifty and the spendthrift, the temperate and the intemperate, and
though the term poverty ceases to be so dreadful, and no longer denotes
want of the natural necessaries of the body, there will still remain the
relatively rich and the relatively poor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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