Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/136

120 aught besides, for here all is life, and nothing a trick of mechanism. Let us take all the good that we can gain from the rare men of religious genius, but never submit and make even them our lords; teachers ever, let them never be masters.

Then there are religious books, such as waken the soul by their direct action,—stirring us to piety, stirring us to morality,—books in which men of great religious growth have garnered up the experience of their life. Some of them are total,—for all religion; some partial,—for the several specialities thereof. These books are sacks of corn carried from land to land, to be sown, and bear manifold their golden fruit. There are not many such in the world. There are few masterpieces of poetry in all the earth; a boy's school-bag would hold them all, from Greece and Rome, Italy, Germany, England. The masterpieces of piety in literature are the rarest of all. In a mineralogist's cabinet what bushels there are of quartz, mica, hornblende, slate, and coal ; and common minerals by heaps; reptiles and fishes done in stone ; only here and there an emerald; and diamonds are exceeding rare. So is it with gems of holy thought. Some psalms are there from the Bible, though seldom a whole one that is true to the soul of man,—now and then an oracle from a Hebrew prophet, full of faith in God, a warrior of piety,—which keep their place in the cabinet of religion, though two or three thousand years have passed by since their authors ceased to be mortal. But the most quickening of all religious literature is still found in the first three Gospels of the New Testament,—in those dear beatitudes, in occasional flowers of religion,—parable and speech. The beatitudes will outlast the pyramids. Yet the New Testament and its choicest texts must be read with the caution of a free-born man. Even in the words of Jesus of Nazareth much is merely Hebrew,—marked with the limitations of the nation and the man. Other religious books there are precious to the heart of man. Some of the works of Augustine, of Thomas a Kempis, of Fenelon, of Jeremy Taylor, of John Bunyan, of William Law, have proved exceeding dear to pious men throughout the Christian world. In a much narrower