Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/196

Rh outward and inward trials, we know not which way to turn. The heart faints and is ready to perish. Then in the deep silence of the soul, when the man turns inward to God, light, comfort, peace dawn on him. His troubles—they are but a dew-drop on his sandal. His enmities or jealousies, hopes, fears, honours, disgraces, all the undeserved mishaps of life, are lost to the view; diminished, and then hid in the mists of the valley he has left behind and below him. Resolution comes over him with its vigorous wing; Truth is clear as noon; the soul in faith rushes to its God. The mystery is at an end.

It is no vulgar superstition to say men are inspired in such times. They are the seed-time of life. Then we live whole years through in a few moments, and afterwards, as we journey on in life, cold, and dusty, and travel-worn, and faint, we look to that moment as a point of light; the remembrance of it comes over us like the music of our home heard in a distant land. Like Elisha in the fable, we go long years in the strength thereof. It travels with us, a great wakening light; a pillar of fire in the darkness, to guide us through the lonely pilgrimage of life. These hours of Inspiration, like the flower of the aloe-tree, may be rare, but are yet the celestial blossoming of Man; the result of the past, the prophecy of the future. They are not numerous to any man. Happy is he that has ten such in a year, yes, in a lifetime.

Now to many men, who have but once felt this—when Heaven lay about them, in their infancy, before the world was too much with them, and they laid waste their powers, getting and spending,—when they look back upon it, across the dreary gulf, where Honour, Virtue, Religion have made shipwreck and perished with their youth, it seems visionary, a shadow, dream-like, unreal. They count it a phantom of their inexperience; the vision of a child's fancy, raw and unused to the world. Now they are wiser. They cease to believe in inspiration. They can only credit the saying of the priests, that long ago there were inspired men; but none now; that you and I must bow our faces to the dust, groping like the Blind-worm and the Beetle; not turn our eyes to the broad, free Heaven; that we cannot walk by the great central and celestial light which God made to guide ail who come into the world, but only by the farthing-candle of tradition, poor and flicker-