Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/131

Rh lessly dead, past all resurrection. This must be healed, tended, and made whole." He is a physician to churches sick of sin, as well as with it; burying the dead, he heals also the sick, and quickens the sound into new and healthy life. But the owners of swine that perish must needs cry out at the loss. Yet such a man is not understood in his own generation. A man with a single eminent faculty is soon seen through and comprehended. This man is good for nothing but practice; that, only for thought. One is a sentimentalist; another, a traveller. But when a genius comes eminent in many and most heterogeneous faculties, men do not see through nor comprehend him in a short time. If he has in himself all the excellence of all the men in the metropolis,—why, it will take many a great city to comprehend him. The young maiden in the story, for the first time hearing her clerical lover preach, wondered that those lips could pray as sweetly as they kissed, but could not comprehend the twofold sacrament, the mystery of this double function of a single mouth. Anybody can see that corn grows in this field, and kale in that; the roughest clown knows this, but it takes a great many wise men to describe the botany of a whole continent. So is it ever. Here is a religious man,—writing on purely internal emotions of piety, of love of God, of faith in Him, of rest for the soul, the foretaste of heaven. He penetrates the deeps of religious joy, its peace enters his soul, his morning prayer is a psalm deeper than David's, with a beauty more various than the poetic wreath which the shepherd-king gathered from the hill- sides of Jordan or the gardens of Mount Zion. Straightway men say: "This man is a sentimentalist; he is a mystic, all contemplation, all feeling,—poetical, dreamy,—his light is moon-shine." But ere long our sentimentalist writes of philosophy, and his keen eye sees mines of wisdom not quarried heretofore, and he brings a power of unsunned gold to light. Other men say: "O, this man is nothing but a philosopher, a mere thinker, a mighty head, but with no more heart than Chimborazo or Thomas Hobbes." Yet presently some great sin breaks out, and rolls its desolating flood over the land, uprooting field and town, and our philosopher goes out to resist the ruin. He denounces the evil, attacks the institution which thus de-