Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 2 (of 3)Parker, Theodore
Religion
Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 2 (of 3)
Parker, Theodore
Sermons, American; Unitarianism
The organization of human rights, the performance of human duties, is an
unlimited work. If there shall ever be a time when it is all done, then
the race will have finished its course. Shall the American nation go on
in this work, or pause, turn off, fall, and perish? To me it seems
almost treason to doubt that a glorious future awaits us. Young as we
are, and wicked, we have yet done something which the world will not let
perish. One day we shall attend more emphatically to the rights of the
hand, and organize labor and skill; then to the rights of the head,
looking after education, science, literature, and art; and again to the
rights of the heart, building up the State with its laws, society with
its families, the church with its goodness and piety. One day we shall
see that it is a shame, and a loss, and a wrong, to have a criminal, or
an ignorant man, or a pauper, or an idler, in the land; that the jail,
and the gallows, and the almshouse are a reproach which need not be. Out
of new sentiments and ideas, not seen as yet, new forms of society will
come, free from the antagonism of races, classes, men--representing the
American idea in its length, breadth, depth, and height, its beauty and
its truth, and then the old civilization of our time shall seem
barbarous and even savage. There will be an American art commensurate
with our idea and akin to this great continent; not an imitation, but a
fresh, new growth. An American literature also must come with democratic
freedom, democratic thought, democratic power--for we are not always to
be pensioners of other lands, doing nothing but import and quote; a
literature with all of German philosophic depth, with English solid
sense, with French vivacity and wit, Italian fire of sentiment and soul,
with all of Grecian elegance of form, and more than Hebrew piety and
faith in God. We must not look for the maiden's ringlets on the baby's
brow; we are yet but a girl; the nameless grace of maturity, and
womanhood's majestic charm, are still to come. At length we must have a
system of education, which shall uplift the humblest, rudest, worst born
child in all the land; which shall bring forth and bring up noble men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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