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
will have none for hypocrisy."
The efforts honestly made by good and honest men, to Judaize the day
still more; to revive the sterner features of ancient worship; to put a
yoke on us which neither we nor our fathers could bear; to transform the
Christian Sunday into the Jewish Sabbath, must lead to a reaction. Abuse
on one side will be met by abuse on the other; despotic asceticism by
license; Judaism by heathenism. Superstition is the mother of denial.
Men will scorn the Sunday; abuse its timely rest. Its hours that may be
devoted to man's highest interests will be prostituted to low aims, and
worldliness make an unbroken sweep from one end of the month to the
other; and then it will take years of toil before mankind can get back
and secure the blessings now placed within an easy reach. I put it to
you, men whose heads time has crowned with white, or sprinkled with a
sober gray, if you would deem it salutary to enforce on your
grandchildren the Sabbath austerities which your parents imposed on you?
In your youth was the Sunday a welcome day; a genial day; or only
wearisome and sour? Was religion, dressed in her Sabbath dress, a
welcome guest; was she lovely and to be desired? Your faces answer. Let
us profit by your experience.
* * * * *
How can we make the Sunday yet more valuable? If we abandon the
superstitious notions respecting its origin and original design, the
evils that have hitherto hindered its use will soon perish of
themselves. They all grow out of that root. If men are not driven into
a reaction by pretensions for the Sunday which facts will not warrant;
if unreasonable austerities are not forced upon them in the name of the
law, and the name of God; there is no danger in our day that men will
abandon an institution which already has done so much service to
mankind. Let Sunday and preaching stand on their own merits, and they
will encounter no more opposition than the common school and the
work-days of the week. Then men will be ready enough to appropriate the
Sunday to the highest objects they know and can appreciate. Tell men the
Sunday is made for man, and they will use it for its highest use. Tell
them man is made for it, and they will war on it as a tyrant. I should
be sorry to see the Sunday devoted to common work; sorry to hear the
clatter of a mill, or the rattle of the wheels of business on that day.
I look with pain on men engaged needlessly in work on that day; not with
the pain of wounded superstition, but a deeper regret. I would not water
my garden with perfumes when common water was at hand. We shall always
have work enough in America; hand-work, and head-work, for common
purposes. There is danger that we shall not have enough of rest, of
intellectual cultivation, of refinement, of social intercourse; that our
time shall be too much devoted to the lower interests of life, to the
means of living and not the end.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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