Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/153

Rh see her endure it all, the slow torture which eats away the mortal from the immortal, with a spirit still unruffled,—with a calm cheerfulness and a strong trust in God? We all have seen such things,—the loveliest forms of martyrdom.

Did you never see a young man with large faculties, fitting him to shine among the loftiest stars of this our human heaven, in the name of duty forego his own intellectual culture for the sake of a mother, a sister, or a father dependent upon his toil, and be a drudge when he might else have been a shining light; and by the grace of religion do it so that in all of what he counted drudgery he was kinglier than a king? Did you never see the wife, the daughter, or the son of a drunkard sustained by their religion to bear sorrows to which Nebuchadnezzar's seven- fold-heated furnace were a rose-garden,—bear it and not complain,—grow sweeter in that bitterness? There are many such examples all about us, and holy souls go through that misery of torture clean as sunlight through the pestilential air of a town stricken with plague. So the pagan poets tell a story of the fountain Arethusa, which, for many a league, ran through the salt and bitter sea, all the way from Peloponnesus to Trinacria, and then came up pure, sweet, and sparkling water, far off in Ortygia, spreading greenness and growth in the valley where the anemone and asphodel paid back their beautj^to the stream which gave them life.

Such are daily examples of the fortitude and strength to suffer which religion gives. When we look carelessly on men in their work or their play, busy in the streets or thoughtful in a church, we think little of the amount of religion there is in these human hearts ; but when you need it in times of great trial, then it comes up in the broad streets and little lanes of life. Disappointment is a bitter root, and sorrow is a bitter flower, and suffering is a bitter fruit, but the religious soul makes medicine thereof, and is strengthened even by the poisons of life. So out of a brewer's dregs and a distiller's waste in a city have I seen the bee suck sweetest honey for present joy, and lay it up for winter's use. Yea, the strong man in the fable, while hungering, found honey in the lion's bones he once had slain; got delight from the destroyer, and meat out of the eater's mouth.