Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/163

Rh out with scorn and hate; and the treason of the traitor to mankind is remembered only with a curse; while the wisdom of the wise, the justice of the upright, the love of the affectionate, and the piety of holy-hearted men, incarnated in the institutions of the State, live, and will for ever live, long after "Rome and America have gone to the ground. Tyrants have a short breath, their fame a sudden ending; and the power of the ungodly, like the lamp of the wicked, shall soon be put out; their counsel is carried, but it is carried headlong. He that seeks only the praise of men gets that but for a day; while the religious man, who seeks only to be faithful to himself and his God, and represent on earth the absolute true and just, all heedless of the applause of men, lives, and will for ever live, in the admiration of mankind, and in "the pure eyes and perfect witness of all-judging Jove." Champollion painfully deciphers the names of the Egyptian kings who built the pyramids and swayed millions of men. For three thousand years that lettered Muse, the sculptured stone, in silence kept the secret of their name. But the fugitive slave, a bondsman of that king, with religion in his heart, has writ his power on all the continents, and dotted the name of Moses on every green or snow-clad isle of either sea. That name shall still endure when the last stones of the last pyramid become gas and exhale to heaven. The peasant of Galilee has embosomed his own name in the religion of mankind, and the world will keep it for ever. Foolish men! building your temple of fame on the expedients of to-day, and of selfishness and cunning and eloquent falsehood! That shall stand,—will it? On the frozen bosom of a northern lake go, build your palace of ice. Colonnade and capital, how they glitter in the light when the northern dawn is red about the pole, or the colder moon looks on your house of frost! "This will endure. Why carve out the granite, and painfully build upon the rock?" Ah me! at the touch of March, the ice-temple and its ice-foundation take the leap of Niagara; and in April the skiff of the fisherman finds no vestige of all that pomp and pride. But the temple of granite,—where is that? Ask Moses, ask Jesus, ask mankind, what power it is that lasts from age to age, when selfish ambition melts in the stream of time.