Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/170

154 joys, delight rising above delight, from the baby fed by his mother's breast to the most experienced man, enlarged by science and by art, filled with a tranquil trust in the infinite protection of the all-bounteous God. The higher the faculty, the more transcendent is its joy.

The partial and transient joy of any faculty comes from the fractional and brief fulfilment of the conditions of its nature; the complete and permanent joy of the whole man comes from a total and continuous supply of the conditions of the entire nature of man.

Now, for this complete and lasting joy, these conditions must be thus fulfilled for me as an individual, for my family, for my neighbourhood, for the nation, and for the world, else my joy is not complete; for though I can in thought for a moment abstract myself from the family, society, nation, and from all mankind, it is but for a moment. Practically I am bound up with all the world; an integer indeed, but a fraction of mankind. I cannot enjoy my daily bread because of the hunger of the men I fain would feed. I am not wholly and long delighted with a book relating some new wonder of science, or offering me some jewelled diadem of literary art, because, I think straightway of the thousand brother men in this town to whom even the old wonders of science and the ancient diadems of literary art are all unknown. The morsel that I eat alone is not sweet, because the fatherless has not eaten it with me. Yet we all desire this complete joy; we are not content without it; I feel it belongs to me, to all men, as individuals and as fractions of society. When mankind comes of age, he must enter on this estate. The very desire thereof shows it is a part of the Divine plan of the world, for each natural desire has the means to satisfy it put somewhere in the universe, and there is a mutual attraction between the two, which at last must meet. Natural desire is the prophecy of satisfaction.

Look over the bountiful distribution of joy in the world. It abounds in the lower walks of creation. The young fish, you shall even now find on the shallow beaches of some sheltered Atlantic bay, how happy they are! Voiceless, dwelling in the cold unsocial element of water, moving with the flapping of the sea, and never still amid the ocean