Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/147

Rh est," if also "the meanest of mankind." I know a great man may ruin himself; stumbling is as easy for a mam- moth as a mouse, and much more conspicuous ; but even in his fall his greatness will be visible. The ruin of a colossus is gigantic,—its fragments are on a grand scale. You read the size of the ship in the timbers of the wreck, fastened with mighty bolts. The Tuscan bard is true to nature as to poetry in painting his odious potentates magnificently mighty even in hell. Satan fallen seems still "not less than archangel ruined!" I do not deny this natural and ineffaceable difference between men in reference to their strength of character, their quantity of being. I am not going to say that conscious piety will make a great man out of a little one; that it would give to George the Third the strength of Charlemagne or Napoleon. No training will make the shrub-oak a tree-oak; no agriculture swell a cape to a continent. But I do mean to say, that religion, conscious piety, will increase the actual strength of the great and of the little; that through want of religious culture the possibility of strength is diminished in both the little and the great.

Not only does religion greater the quantity of power, it betters its quality at the same time. So it both enlarges a man's general power for himself or his brother, and enhances the mode of that power, thus giving him a greater power of usefulness and a greater power of welfare, more force to delight, more force to enjoy. This is true of religion taken in its wide sense,—a life in harmony with myself, in concord with my brother, in unity with my God; true of religion in its highest form, the conscious worship of the Infinite God by the normal use of every faculty of the spirit, every limb of the body, and every portion of material or social power.

Without this conscious religious development, it seems to me that no strength or greatness is admirably human; and with it, no smallness of opportunity, no littleness of gift, is contemptible or low. I reverence great powers given or got; but I reverence much more the faithful use of powers either large or little.

Strength of character appears in two general modes of power, accordingly as it is tried by one or other of two