Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/142

 his body and of each faculty of his spirit, and can use them each after its own law in his particular position. Then he will do right with as little trouble as he walks about his daily work. His life will sanctify itself.

Do you know how artists make their great pictures? First, they form the idea. It is a work of sweat and watching. The man assembles all the shapes of beauty and of power which he has ever seen, or thought, or fancied, or felt. They flash along before his quickened eye, wildered and wandering now. New forms of beauty spring into life at the bidding of his imagination, — so flowers at touch of spring. Ere long he has his idea, composite, gathered from many a form of partial beauty, and yet one; a new creation never seen before. Thus in his seething mind Phidias smelts the several beauty of five hundred Spartan maids into his one Pallas-Athena, born of his head this time, a grand eclecticism of loveliness. So Michael devised his awful form of God creating in the Vatican; and Raphael his dear Cecilia, sweetest of pictured saints,—so fair, she drew the angels down to see her sing, and ears were turned to eyes. Now the artist has formed his idea. But that is not all. Next, he must make the idea that is in his mind a picture in the eyes of men; his personal fiction must become a popular fact. So he toils over this new work for many a weary day, and week, and month, and year, with penitential brush oft painting out what once amiss he painted in,—for even art has its error, the painter's sin, and so its remorse; the artist is made wiser by his own defeat. At last his work stands there complete,—the holy queen of art. Genius is the father, of a heavenly line ; but the mortal mother, that is Industry.

Now as an artist, like Phidias, Angelo, or Raphael, must hold a great act of imagination to form his idea, and then industriously toil, often wiping out in remorse what he drew in passion or in ignorance; so the man who would be religious must hold his creative act of prayer, to set the great example to himself, and then industriously toil to make it daily life, shaping his actual, not from the chance of circumstance, but from the ideal purpose of his soul.

There is no great growth in manly piety without fire to