Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/121

Rh the constitution of the universe, the more, so will this religion continue to increase, and the results thereof appear in common life, in the individual, domestic, social, national, and universal human form.

Some men say they cannot love, or even know, God, except in the form of man. God as the Infinite seems to them abstract, and they cannot lay hold on Him until a man fills their corporeal eye and arms, and the affections cling thereto and are blest. So they love Christ,—not the Jesus of history, but the Christ of the Christian mythology,—an imaginary being, an ideal incarnation of God in man. Let them help themselves with this crutch of the fancy, as boys use sticks to leap a ditch or spring a wall; yet let them remember that the real historical incarnation of God is in mankind, not in one person, but all, and human history is a continual transfiguration. As the Divine seems nearest when human, and men have loved to believe in the union of God and man, so religion is loveliest when it assumes the form of common life,—when daily work is a daily sacrament, and life itself a psalm of gratitude and prayer of aspiration.

It is Palm Sunday to-day, and men in churches remember what is written of the peasant from Galilee who rode into Jerusalem amid multitudes of earnest men not merely waiting for consolation, but going to meet it half-way, who yet knew not what they did, nor whom they welcomed. As that man went to the capital of a nation which knew him not, so in our time Religion rides her ass-colt into village and town, welcome to many a weary, toiling heart, but ignored and pelted by the successors of such as "took counsel against Jesus, to put him to death." How little do we know ! But he that keeps the integrity of his own consciousness, and is faithful to himself day by day, is also faithful to God for eternity, and helps to restore the integrity of the world of men.

The religious actions of old times it is now easy to understand. They left their monuments, their pyramids, and temples which they built, the memory of the wars they fought against their brothers in the dear name of Jesus, or of Allah the Only. But the religious action of this age, not in the old form,—it will take the next generation to understand that.