Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/139

Rh lessons did Socrates, Jesus, and Luther, learn from the great Bible of God, ever open before mankind ! It is only indirectly that He speaks in the sight of a city,—the brick garden with dioecious fops for flowers. But in the country all is full of God, and the eternal flowers of heaven seem to shed sweet influence on the perishable blossoms of the earth. Nature is full of religious lessons to a thoughtful man. The great sermon of Jesus was preached on a mountain, which preached to him as he to the people, and his figures of speech were first natural figures of fact. But the religious use to be made of natural objects would require a sermon of itself.

The great reliance for religious growth must not be on anything external; not on the great and living souls whom God sends, rarely, to the earth, to water the dry ground with their eloquence, and warm it with their human love; nor must it be on the choicest gems of religious thought, wherein saints and sages have garnered up their life and left it for us. We cannot rely on the beauty or the power of outward Nature to charm our wandering soul to obedience and trust in God. These things may jostle us by the elbow when we read, warn us of wandering, or of sloth, and open the gate, but we must rely on ourselves for entering in. By the aid of others and our own action we must form the ideal of a religious man, of what we ought to be and do, under our peculiar circumstances. To form this personal ideal, and fit ourselves thereto, requires an act of great earnestness on our part. It is not a thing to be done in an idle hour. It demands the greatest activity of the mightiest mode of mind. But what a difference there is between men in earnestness of character! Do you understand the "religion" of a frivolous man? With him it is all a trifle; the fashion of his religion is of less concern than the fashion of his hat or of the latchet of his shoes. He asks not for truth, for justice, for love,—asks not for God, cares not. The great sacrament of religious life is to him less valuable than a flask of Ehenish wine broke on a jester's head. The specific levity of these men appears in their relation to religion. The fool hath said in his heart, "There is no God." Quoth the fop in his waistcoat, "What if there be none?