Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/173

Rh broad, not very deep, but wide and deep enough to bathe their every limb, and bring contentment and satisfaction to each want. Did not the same God who pours out the light from yonder golden sun, and holds all the stars in his leash of love, make and watch over the smallest of these creatures? Nay, He who leaves not forsaken Jesus alone never deserts the spider and the toad.

Wait a few weeks and go into the fields, of a warm day, at morning, noon, or night, and all creation is a-hum with happiness, the young and old, the reptile, insect, beast, and fowls of heaven, rejoice in their brave delight. All about us is full of joy, fuller than we notice. Take a handful of water from the rotting timbers of a wharf; little polyps are therein, medusae and the like, with few senses, few faculties; but they all swim in a tide of joy, and it seems as if the world was made for them alone; for them the tide ebbs and flows, for them the winter goes, the summer comes, and the universe subsists for them alone.

Some men tell us that, at the other extreme of the scale, those vast bodies, the suns and satellites, have also a consciousness and a delight ; that " in reason's ear they all rejoice." But that is poetry. Not in reason's, but fancy's ear do they rejoice. The rest is fact, plain prose.

All animate creatures in their natural condition have, it is true, their woes ; but they are brief in time, little in quantity, and soon forgot. When you look microscopically and telescopically at the natural suffering in the world of animals, you find it is just enough to tie the girdle, and hold the little creature together, and keep him from violating his own individual being; or else to unite the tribe and keep them from violating their social being. So it seems only the girdle of the individual of the flock, and no more an evil, when thus looked at, than the bruises we get in our essays to walk. Suffering marks the outer limit of the narrow margin of oscillation left for the caprice of the individual animal or man,—the pain a warning to mark the bound.

A similar joy appears in young children well born and well nurtured. But the human power of error, though still not greater in proportion to our greater nature, is so much more, and man so little subordinate to his instincts, that we have wandered far from the true road of material