Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/174

158 happiness. So the new-born child comes trailing the errors of his ancestry behind him at his birth. Still, the healthy child, wisely cared for, though tethered with such a brittle chain of being, is no exception to the general rule of joy. He

In the world of adult men there is much less of this joy; it is not a great river that with mighty stream runs round and round the world of human consciousness, all ignorant of ebb. Our faces are care- stricken, not many joyous; most of them look as if they had met and felt the peltings of the storm, and only hoped for the rainbow. The songs of the people are mostly sad; only the savage in tropic climes—subordinate to nature, there a gentle mistress—is blithe and gay as the monkeys and the parrots in his native grove of Africa ; and there his joy is only jollity, the joy of saucy flesh. There are two chief causes for this lack of joy with men. This is one:—

I. We have not yet fulfilled the necessary material conditions thereof. The individual has not kept the natural law, and hence has some schism in the flesh from his intemperance or want; some schism in the spirit from lack of harmony within; or there is some schism between him and the world of matter, he is not in unison with things around; he has a miserable body, that goes stooping and feeble, must be waited for and waited on, and, like the rulers of the Gentiles, exercises authority over him; or he lacks development of spiritual powers ; or else is poor, and needs material supplies. Or if the special individual is right in all these things, and so might have his personal joy, the mass of men in your neighbourhood, your nation, or the world, are deficient in all these, in body, mind, and estate, and with your individual joy there comes a social grief, and so the