Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/142

Rh brother needs more than he. Like God himself, he is kind to the thankless and unmerciful. Purity without and Piety within; these are his Heaven, both present and to come. Is not his flesh as holy as his soul—his body a temple of God?

If trouble comes on him, which Prudence could not foresee, nor Strength overcome, nor Wisdom escape from, he bears it with a heart serene and full of peace. Over every gloomy cavern, and den of despair, Hope arches her rainbow; the ambrosial light descends. Religion shows him that, out of desert rocks, black and savage, where the Vulture has her home, where the Storm and the Avalanche are born, and whence they descend, to crush and to kill; out of these hopeless cliffs, falls the river of Life, which flows for all, and makes glad the people of God. When the Storm and the Avalanche sweep from him all that is dearest to mortal hope, is he comfortless? Out of the hard marble of Life, the deposition of a few joys and many sorrows, of birth and death, and smiles and grief, he hews him the beautiful statue of religious Tranquillity. It stands ever beside him, with the smile of heavenly satisfaction on its lip, and its thrusting finger pointing to the sky.

The true religious man, amid all the ills of time, keeps a serene forehead, and entertains a peaceful heart. Thus going out and coming in amid all the trials of the city, the agony of the plague, the horrors of the thirty tyrants, the fierce democracy abroad, the fiercer ill at home, the Saint, the Sage of Athens, was still the same. Such an one can endure hardness; can stand alone and be content; a rock amid the waves, lonely, but not moved. Around him the few or many may scream their screams, or cry their clamours; calumniate or blaspheme. What is it all to him, but the cawing of the sea-bird about that solitary and deep-rooted stone? So swarms of summer flies, and spiteful wasps, may assail the branches of an oak, which lifts its head, storm-tried and old, above the hills. They move a leaf, or bend a twig, by their united weight. Their noise, fitful and malicious, elsewhere might frighten the sheep in the meadows. Here it becomes a placid hum. It joins the wild whisper of the leaves. It swells the breezy music of the tree, but makes it bear no acorn less.