Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/166

I see much to complain of in the condition of piety; seems worse still, for worse, lucre has not been "a decline of piety" in Boston of late years. Religion is not sick. Last Sunday I spoke of the great progress made in morality within fifty years; I said it was an immense progress within two hundred years. Now, there cannot be such a progress, in the outward manifestation without a corresponding and previous development of the inward principle. Morality cannot grow without piety, more than an oak without water, earth, sun, and air. Let me go back one hundred years; see what a difference between the religious aspect of things then and now ! certainly there has been a great growth in spirituality since that day. I am not to judge men's hearts; I may take their outward lives as the teat and measure of their inward piety. Will you say the outward life never completely comes up to that? It does so as completely now as then. Compare the toleration of these times with those ; compare the intelligence of the community ; the temperance, sobriety, chastity, virtue in. general. Look at what is now done in a municipal way by towns and States for mankind; see the better provision made for the poor, for the deaf, the dumb, the blind, for the insane, even for the idiot; see what is done for the education of the people—in schools, academies, colleges, and by public lectures; what is done for the criminal, to prevent the growth of crime. See what an amelioration of the penal laws ; how men are saved and restored to society, who had once been wholly lost. See what is done by philanthropy still more eminent, which the town and State have not yet overtaken and enacted into law; by the various societies for reform—those for temperance, for peace, for the discipline of prisons, for the discharged convicts, for freeing the slave. See this anti-Slavery party, which, in twenty years, has become so powerful throughout all the Northern States, so strong that it cannot be howled down, and men begin to find it hardly safe to howl over it; a party which only waits the time to lilt up its million arms, and hurl the hateful institution of Slavery out of the land! All these humane movements come from a divine piety in the soul, of man. A tree which bears such fruits is not a dead tree; is not wholly to