Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/109

Rh man and maid into one complete and perfect solidarity of human life, each finding wholeness and enjoyment while seeking only to delight! What beautiful homes are built on marriages like that! what families of love are born and bred therein! But take away the affection, the self-denial, the mutual surrender, aggravate the instinctive love to the unnatural selfishness of lust seeking its own enjoyment, heedless of its victim, and how hateful is the beastly conjunction of David, Solomon, Messallina, Mohammed, of Gallic Cassanova, or Moscovian Catharine. Religion bereft of love to men becomes more hateful yet,—a lusting after God. It has reddened with blood many a page of human history, and made the ideal torments of hell a flaming fact in every Christian land. The Catharines of such a religion, the Cassanovas of the soul, are to me more hideous than Bacchanalians of the flesh. Let us turn off our eyes from a sight so foul. Piety of mind, the love of truth, is only a fragment of piety; piety of conscience, the love of right, is also fragmentary; so is love of men, piety of the heart. Each is a beautiful fragment, all three not a whole piety. We want to unite them all with the consciousness of God, into a complete, perfect, and total religion, the piety of mind and conscience, heart and soul,—to love God with all the faculties,—to love Him as truth, as justice, as love, as God, who unites in Himself infinite truth, infinite justice, infinite love, and is the Father of all. We need to do this consciously, to be so wonted to thus loving Him, that it is done spontaneously, without effort, and yet not merely by instinct; done personally, not against our own consent. Then we want to express this fourfold total piety by our outward morality, in its natural forms and various degrees.

I mentioned, that in human history the religious faculty had often tyrannized over the other powers of men; I think it should precede them in its development, should be the controlling power in every man, the universal force which sways the several parts. In the history of man the soul has done so, but in most perverse forms of action. In the mass of men the religious element is always a little in advance of all the rest. Last Sunday I said that the affec-