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 universe was on the side of right, and themselves workers with God!
The abolitionists did not aim to found a political party; they set forth
an idea. If they had set up the interest of the whigs or the democrats,
the manufacturers or the merchants, they might have formed a party and
had a high place in it, with money, ease, social rank and a great name
in the party--newspapers. Some of them had political talents, ideas more
than enough, the power of organizing men, the skill to manage them, and
a genius for eloquence. With such talents, it demands not a little
manliness to keep out of politics and in the truth.
To found a political party there is no need of a great moral idea: the
whig party has had none such this long time; the democratic party
pretends to none and acts on none; each represents an interest which can
be estimated in dollars; neither seems to see that behind questions of
political economy there is a question of political morality, and the
welfare of the nation depends on the answer we shall give! So long as
the abolitionists had nothing but an idea, and but few men had that,
there was no inducement for the common run of politicians to join them;
they could make nothing by it, so nothing of it. The guardians of
education, the trustees of the popular religion, did not like to invest
in such funds. But still the idea went on, spite of the most entire,
the most bitter, the most heartless and unrelenting opposition ever
known in America. No men were ever hated as the abolitionists; political
parties have joined to despise, and sectarian churches to curse them.
Yet the idea has gone on, till now all that is most pious in the sects,
most patriotic in the parties, all that is most Christian in modern
philanthropy, is on its side. It has some representative in almost every
family, save here and there one whose God is mammon alone, where the
parents are antediluvian and the children born old and conservative,
with no faculty but memory to bind them to mankind. It has its spokesmen
in the House and the Senate. The tide rises and swells, and the compact
wall of the whig party, the tall ramparts of the democrats, are
beginning to "cave in."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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