Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/67

20 couragements, strive to pluck up by the roots this plant which God has set in the midst of the garden. But there it stands—the tree of Knowledge, the tree of Life. Even such as boast the name of Infidel and Atheist find, unconsciously, repose in its wide shadow, and refreshment in its fruit. It blesses obedient men. He who violates the divine law, and thus would wring this feeling from his heart, feels it, like a heated iron, in the marrow of his bones.

III. Still further; this religious element is the strongest and deepest in human nature. It depends on nothing outside, conventional or artificial. It is identical in all men; not a similar thing, but the same. Superficially, man differs from man, in the less and more; but in the nature of the primitive religious element all agree, as in whatever is deepest. Out of the profoundest abyss in man proceed his worship, his prayer, his hymn of praise. The history of the world shows us what a space Religion fills. She is the mother of philosophy and the arts; has presided over the greatest wars. She holds now all nations with her unseen hand; restrains their passions, more powerful than all the cunning statutes of the lawgiver; awakens their virtue; allays their sorrows with a mild comfort, all her own; brightens their hopes with the purple ray of faith, shed through the sombre curtains of necessity.

Religious emotion often controls society, inspires the lawgiver and the artist—is the deep-moving principle; it has called forth the greatest heroism of past ages; the proudest deeds of daring and endurance have been done in its name. Without Religion, all the sages of a kingdom cannot build a city; but with it, how a rude fanatic sways the mass of men. The greatest works of human art have risen only at Religion's call. The marble is pliant at her magic touch, and seems to breathe a pious life. The chiselled stone is instinct with a living soul, and stands there, silent, yet full of hymns and prayers; an embodied aspiration, a thought with wings that mock at space and time. The Temples of the East, the Cathedrals of the West; Altar and Column and Statue and Image,—these are the tribute Art pays to her. Whence did Michael Angelo, Phidias, Praxiteles, and all the mighty sons of Art,