Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/144

128 advent of a child, mellows the hours. Then nurse the tender plant of piety ; one day its bloom will adorn your gloomy hour, and be a brightness in many a winter day which now you reck not of.

There are days of sadness when it rains sorrow on you,—when you mourn the loss of friends, their sad defeat in mortal life, or worse still, the failure of yourself, your wanderings from the way of life, or prostrate fall therein. Use, then, man, these hours for penitence, if need be, and vigorous resolve. Water the choicest, tender plants; one day the little seedling you have planted with your tears shall be a broad tree, and under its arms you will screen your head from the windy storm and the tempest;—yes, find for your bones a quiet grave at last.

Do you commit a sin, an intentional violation of the law of God, you may make even that help you in your religious growth. He who never hungered knows not the worth of bread; who never suffered, nor sorrowed, nor went desolate and alone, knows not the full value of human sympathy and human love. I have sometimes thought that a man who had never sinned nor broke the integrity of his consciousness, nor, by wandering, disturbed the continuity of his march towards perfection,—that he could not know the power of religion to fortify the soul. But there are no such men. We learn to walk by stumbling at the first; and spiritual experience is also bought by errors of the soul. Penitence is but the cry of the child hurt in his fall. Shame on us that we affect the pain so oft, and only learn to whine an unnatural contrition! Sure I am that the grief of a soul self-wounded, the sting of self-reproach, the torment of remorse for errors of passion, for sins of calculation, may quicken any man in his course to manhood, till he runs and is not weary. The mariner learns wisdom from each miscarriage of his ship, and fronts the seas anew to triumph over wind and wave.

Some of you are young men and maidens. You look forward to be husbands and wives, to be fathers and mothers, some day. Some of you seek to be rich, some honoured. Is it not well to seek to have for yourself a noble, manly character, to be religious men and women,