Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/133

Rh It is a great thing to meet such a man once in your life- time, to be cheered and comforted in your sad wayfaring, and filled with new vigour and new faith in the Father of all. After that we thank God, and take courage and fare on our happier way. So a company of pilgrims journeying in the wilderness, dry, foot-sore, and hot, the water all spent in their goat- skins, their camels weary and sick, come to a grove of twelve palm-trees, and an unexpected spring of pure water swells up in the desert. Straightway their weariness is all forgot, their limping camels have be- come whole once more. Staying their thirst, they fill their bottles also with the cool refreshment, rest in the shadow from the noonday's heat, and then with freshened life, the soreness gone from every bone, pursue their noiseless and their happy march. Even so, says the Old Testament story, God sent his angel down in the wilderness to feed Elias with the bread of heaven, and in the strength thereof the prophet went his forty days, nor hungered not. I suppose some of us have had this experience, and in our time of bewilderment, of scorching desolation, and of sor- row, have come upon our well of water and twelve palm- trees in the sand, and so have marched all joyful through the wilderness. Elias left all the angels of God for you and me, — the friendlier for his acquaintance.

There is a continual need of men of this stamp. We live in the midst of religious machinery. Many mechanics at piety, often only apprentices and slow to learn, are turning the various ecclesiastical mills, and the creak of the motion is thought "the voice of God." You put into the hopper a crowd of persons, young and old, and soon they are ground out into the common run of Christians, sacked up, and stored away for safe-keeping in the appropriate bins of the great ecclesiastical establishment, and labelled with their party names. You look about in what is dryly called "the religious world." What a mass of machinery is there, of dead timber, not green trees! what a jar and discord of iron clattering upon iron! Action is of machinery, not of life, and it is green new life that you want. So men grow dull in their churches. What a weariness is an ordinary meeting on one of the fifty-two ordinary Sundays of the year ! What a dreary thing is an ordinary sermon of an ordinary minister ! He does not wish to preach it;