Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/18

2 present time, with what is universal, and for ever. This being so, what place ought piety, the love of God, to hold in a manly life? It seems to me that piety lies at the basis of all manly excellence. It represents the universal action of man ac- cording to his nature. This universal action, the bent of the whole man in his normal direction, is the logical condition of any special action of man in a right direction, of any particular bent that way. If I have a universal idea of universal causality in my mind, I can then understand a special cause; but without that universal idea of causality in my mind, patent or latent, I could not understand any particular cause whatever. My eye might see the fact of a man cutting down a tree, but my mind would comprehend only the conjunction in time and space, not their connection in causality. If you have not a universal idea of beauty, you do not know that this is a handsome and that a homely dress; you notice only the form and colour, the texture and the fit, but see no relation to an ideal loveliness. If you have not a universal idea of the true, the just, the holy, you do not comprehend the odds betwixt a correct statement and a He, between the deed of the priest and that of the good Samaritan, between the fidelity of Jesus and the falseness of Iscariot. This rule runs through all human nature. The universal is the logical condition of the generic, the special, and the particular. So the love of God, the universal object of the human spirit, is the logical condition of all manly life. This is clear, if you look at man acting in each of the four modes just spoken of,—intellectual, moral, affectional, and religious. The Mind contemplates God as manifested in truth ; for truth—in the wide meaning of the word including also a comprehension of the useful and the beautiful — is the universal category of intellectual cognition. To love God with the mind is to love him as manifesting himself in the truth, or to the mind ; it is to love truth, not for its uses, but for itself, because it is true, absolutely beautiful and lovely to the mind. In finite things we read the infinite truth, the absolute object of the mind.

Love of truth is a great intellectual excellence ; but it is plain you must have the universal love of universal truth