Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/140

124 What is that to me? Let us dance and be silly!" Did you ever see a frivolous man and maid in love,—so they called it? I have: it was like putting on a new garment of uncertain fit; and the giving and the taking of what was called a "heart" was like buying a quantity of poison weed to turn to empty smoke. They were "fearfully and wonderfully made for each other." So have I seen a silly man give a bad coin to a beggar in the streets. I know there are those whose practical religion is only decency. They have no experience of religion but the hiring of a seat in a church where pew and pulpit both invite to sleep,—whose only sacrifice is their pew-tax; their single sacrament but bodily presence in a church. There are meeting-houses full of such men, which ecclesiastical upholsterers have furnished with pulpit, and pew, and priest, objects of pity to men with human hearts!

When an earnest young man offers a woman his heart and his life and his love, asking her for her heart and her life and her love, it is no easy hour to man or maid. The thought of it takes the rose out of the young cheek, gives a new lustre to the eye which has a deeper and mysterious look, and a terrible throbbing to the heart. For so much depends upon a word that forms or else misshapes so much in life, and soul and sense are clamouring for their right. The past comes up to help create the future, and all creation is new before the lover's eye, and all

So is it in some great hour when an earnest man holds communion with himself, seeking to give and take with God, and asks, "What ought I in my life to be and do?" Depend upon it, only to the vulgarest of men is it a common hour. I will not say that every earnest man has his one enamoured hour of betrothing himself to religion. Some have this sudden experience, and give themselves to piety as they espouse a bride found when not looked for, and welcomed with a great swelling of the heart and prophetic bloomings of the yearning soul. Others go hand in hand therewith as brother and sister, through all their early days in amiable amity which sin has never broke and sel-