Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/163

116 that nestle contentedly, brooding over their young, quietly tending the little strugglers with their beak,—all these have a religious significance to a thinking soul. Every violet blooms of God, each lily is fragrant with the presence of deity. The awful scenes, of storm, and lightning and thunder, seem but the sterner sounds of the great concert, wherewith God speaks to man. Is this an accident? Ay, earth is full of such “accidents.” When the seer rests from religious thought, or when the world's temptations make his soul tremble, and though the spirit be willing the flesh is weak; when the perishable body weighs down the mind, musing on many things; when he wishes to draw near to God, he goes, not to the city—there conscious men obstruct him with their works—but to the meadow, spangled all over with flowers, and sung to by every bird; to the mountain,“visited all night by troops of stars;” to the ocean, the undying type of shifting phenomena and unchanging law; to the forest, stretching out motherly arms, with its mighty growth and awful shade, and there, in the obedience these things pay, in their order, strength, beauty, he is encountered front to front with the awful presence of Almighty power. A voice cries to him from the thicket, “God will provide.” The bushes burn with deity. Angels minister to him. There is no mortal pang, but it is allayed by God's fair voice as it whispers, in nature, still and small, it may be, but moving on the face of the deep, and bringing light out of darkness.

Now to sum up the result. It seems from the very Idea of God that he must be infinitely present in each point of space. This immanence of God in Matter is the basis of his influence; this is modified by the capacities of the objects in Nature; all of its action is God's action; its laws modes of that action. The imposition of a law, then, which is perfect, and is also perfectly obeyed, though blindly and without self-consciousness, seems to be the measure of God's relation to Matter. Its action therefore is only mechanical, vital or instinctive, not voluntary