Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/120

104 lowing only as they were led by men, built up the cathedrals of Upsala and Strasburg. In the order of development, the material comes first; even the excessive lust of gain, now turning the heads of Old England and the New, is part of the cure of the former unnatural mistake. Gross poverty is on its way to the grave. The natural man is before the spiritual man. We are laying a basis for a spiritual structure which no man has genius yet to plan. Years ago there were crowds of men at work in Lebanon, cutting down the algum, the cedar, and the fir, squaring into ashlar, boring, chiselling, mortising, tenoning, all manner of beams some were rafting it along the coast to Joppa, and yet others teaming it up to Jerusalem. What sweat of horses was there, what lowing of oxen and complaint from the camels! Thousands of men were quarrying stone at Moriah for the foundation of the work. Yet only one man comprehended it all; the lumberers felling the cedar and sycamore, the carpenters and the muleteers, understood each their special work, no more. But the son of the Danite woman planned all this stone and timber into a temple, which, by the labour of many and the consciousness of a few, rose up on the mountain of Jerusalem, the wonder and the pride of all the land. So the great work, the humanization of man, is going forward. The girl that weaves muslins at Brussels, the captain of the emigrant ship sailing "past bleak Mozambique," hungry for Australian gold, the chemist who annihilates pain with a gas and teaches lightning to read and write, the philosopher who tells us the mighty faculties which lie hid in labyrinthine man, and the philanthropic maiden who in the dirt of a worldly city lives love which some theologians think is too much for God,—all of these, and thousands more, are getting together and preparing the materials for the great temple of man, whose builder and maker is God. You and I shall pass away, but mankind is the true son of God that abideth ever, to whom the Father says continually, "Come up higher."

I see the silent growth of religion in men. I see that the spiritual elements are a larger fraction of human consciousness than ever before; that there is more of truth, of justice, of love, and faith in God than was ever in the world. As we know and observe the natural laws of man,