The church is a baby-house made of blocks

"The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves.  Why, a free-spoken man of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes.  Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so is the state
. . . If there were any magnanimity in us, any grandeur of soul, anything but sects and parties undertaking to patronize God and keep the mind within bounds, how often we might encourage and provoke one another by free expression . . . The church, the state, the school, the magazine, do you think they are liberal and free!  It is the freedom of the prison-yard! . . . What is it you tolerate, you church today?  Not truth but a lifelong hypocrisy.  Let us have institutions framed not out of our rottenness, but out of our soundness.  This factitious piety is like stale gingerbread.  I would like to suggest what a pack of fools and cowards we mankind are.  They want me to agree not to breathe too hard in the neighborhood of their paper castles. If I should draw a long breath in the neighborhood of these institutions, their weak and flabby sides would fall out, for my inspiration would exhaust the air about them.  The church!  it is eminently the timid institution . . .
The church! it is eminently the timid institution . . . [And] what is called faith is an immense prejudice . . . People are the creatures of an institution. They do not think; they adhere like oysters to what their fathers and grandfathers adhered to."

Henry David Thoreau, from Selections from the Journals.

Photo: Hewlitt Gulch Fire, Poudre Canyon, CO, May 15, 2012