Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/167

Rh imposed upon himself, his tear-stained face. Smiles are strange phenomena in a church; sadness and tears are therein at home.

Even the less earnest sects of America, calling them- selves "Liberal Christians," whose ship of souls does not lie very deep in the sea of life, seem to think joy is not very nearly related to religion. The piety of a round-faced and joyous man is always a little suspected. The Cross is still the popular symbol of Christianity, and the type of the saint is a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, having no form or comeliness. Sermons of joy you seldom hear; the voice of the pulpit is mainly a whine; its flowers are nightshade, and its psalms a Miserere.

Everybody knows what joy is,—a certain sense of gladness and of pleasure, a contentment and a satisfaction, sometimes noisily breaking into transient surges of rapture, sometimes rolling with the tranquil swell of calm delight. It is a state which comes upon any particular faculty, when that finds its natural gratification. So there may be a partial joy of any one faculty, or a total joy of the whole man, all the faculties normally developed and normally gratified. If religion be the service of God by the normal development, use, and enjoyment of every limb of the body, every faculty of the spirit, and every power acquired over matter or man, then it is plain that religion must always aim at, and under favourable circumstances will achieve, a complete and total joy for all men.

There is no man wholly destitute of some partial and transient joy; for if all the conditions needful to the welfare of each faculty of mind, or to each appetite, were wanting, then, part by part, the man would perish and disappear. On the other hand, no man, I think, has ever had a complete, total, and permanent enjoyment of every part of his nature. That is the ideal to which we tend, but one not capable of complete attainment in a progressive being. For if the ideal of yesterday has become the actual of to-day, to-morrow we are seized with manly disquiet and unrest, and soar up towards another ideal.

We have all more or less of joy, the quantity and quality differing amazingly amongst men. There are as many forms of joy as there are propensities which hunger and