Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/113

Rh more, your achievement of the divine becomes more. You love with no divided love; there is no collision of faculties, the head forbidding what the soul commands, the heart working one way and the conscience another. The same Object corresponds to all these faculties, which love Him as truth, as justice, as love, as God who is all in all; one central sun balances and feeds with fire this system of harmonious orbs.

Consider the power of religion in a man whose mind and conscience, heart and soul, are all well developed. He has these four forms of piety; they all unite, each to all, and all to each. His mind gives him knowledge of truth, the necessary condition for the highest action of his conscience; that furnishes him with the idea of justice, which is the necessary condition for the highest action of the affections; they in their development extend to all in their wide love of men ; this affords the necessary condition for the highest action of the soul, which can then love God with absolute love, and, joining with all the other activity of the man, helps the use, development, and enjoyment of every faculty. Then truth has lost its coldness ; justice is not hard and severe ; love is not partial, as when limited to family, tribe, or nation; but, coextensive with justice, applies to all mankind; faith is not mystical or merely introversive and quietistic. This fourfold action joins in one unity of worship, in love of God,—love with the highest and conjoint action of all the faculties of man. Then love of the Infinite God is no mystical abstraction, no dreamy sentimentalism, but the normal action of the entire man, every faculty seeking its finite contentment, and finding also its infinite satisfaction by feeling the life of God in the soul of man. In our time, as often before, attempts are making to cultivate the soul, in the narrowest way, without developing the other parts of man's spiritual nature. The intellect is called "carnal," conscience " dangerous," and the heart "deceitful." We are told to trust none of these in matters of religion. Accordingly, ecclesiastical men complain that "science is not religious," because it breaks down the "venerable doctrines" of the Church,—because geologists have swept away the flood, grammarians annihilated the