Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/20

Rh mysteries of evil and sin and suffering here, will be fulfilled and overpassed beyond our highest dreams.

Sixthly and lastly, From the doctrine that God is for ever present and active in the souls of His creatures, it follows that it is possible for man to obtain communion with Him at all times. Prayer (for spiritual blessings) is no self-acting delusion. It is a real drawing nigh of the soul to God. There is “One who heareth prayer,” and who is ever near us waiting to hear and bless it. The relation between the creature and the Creator, unconscious in the material part, and at best a dim sympathy in the intellectual love of truth and the æsthetic sense of beauty, becomes conscious and vivid in the moral and spiritual when the will of man bows itself freely before the will of God, and the finite and infinite spirits meet in the awful communion of intense Prayer. It is the most sacred of all mysteries,—the most solemn thing in all man's life, the greatest reality of his existence. The help and light to be gained through such prayer is a natural thing, not a miraculous one. We do not ask God to change His laws, but to fulfil them. It is the law of spirit, that as we draw to Him so He draws to us. The magnetic bar which has lost its power, regains it when we hang it in the plane of the meridian. The plant which was sickly, weak, and white, growing in the shade, acquires health and verdure in the sunshine. If we bring our pale, faded souls within the rays of God's warmth we may say with confidence, “Heal us, O Father! for we know that it is Thy will.”

The creed which we have now summed up so briefly has few articles:

This is the entire theology of Theodore Parker. It contains no doctrines of a Fall, an Incarnation, a Trinity, an Atonement, a Devil, or a Hell,—no Original Sin, and no Imputed Righteousness. Its Morality is summed up in the Two Great Commandments of the Law, and its “Theory of Reconciliation” in the parable of the “Prodigal Son.”

To this religion, at once spiritual and rational, Parker gave the name of ,—a name antithetic to Atheism alone, and comprehensive of every worshipper of God; a name not understood,