Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2

There are two classes of philanthropists; one alleviates and the other cures. There is one class of philanthropists that undertakes when a man commits an evil to help him out of it. There is another class that endeavors to abolish the temptation. The first is sentiment, the last is Christianity.

The religion of to-day has too many pulpits. Men say we have not churches enough. We have too many. Two hundred thousand men in New York never enter a church. There is not room. Thank God for that! If there are two hundred thousand Christian men in New York that cannot get into a church, all the better. They do not need to enter. Christianity never intended the pulpit in the guise in which we have it. In yonder college, do they keep boys for seventy years on their hands, lecturing to them on science? When Agassiz has taught his pupils fully, he sends them out to learn by practice. Of these fifty or sixty pulpits in this city, we don't need more than ten or twenty. They will accommodate all who should hear preaching. The rest should be in the State prison talking to the inmates; they should be in North Street, laboring there among the poor and depraved. Their worship should be putting their gifts to use, not sitting down and hearing for the hundredth time a repetition of arguments against theft. There will never be any practical Christianity until we cease to teach it, and let men begin to learn by practice. You never saw a Quaker pauper; because the moment a Quaker begins to fail, the better influences surround and besiege him, help him over the shallows, strengthen his purpose, watch his steps, hold up the weary hands and feeble knees, and see to it that he never falls so low as to be a pauper. Break down these narrow Quaker walls, and let your Christianity model a world on the finer elements of that sect!