Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/187

Rh seed you planted for the bread of another becomes- a perfect flower for your own eye and bosom; but you receive from another self. This is one of the dearest joys; it is the mutuality of affection, your delight in another's person, and his delight in you; it is a reciprocity of persons. There are those we love not with instinctive passion, as man and wife; nor with instinctive affection, as parent and child; nor with the love of philanthropy; but with emotions of another class, with friendly love. It is delightful to do kind deeds for such, and receive kind deeds from them. Not that you need or they need the gift; but both the giving. You need to give to them, they to give to you. Their very presence is a still and silent joy. After long intimacy of this sort, you scarce need speech to communicate sympathy; the fellow-feeling has a language and tells its own tale. In loving a friend I have all the joy of self-love without its limitation. I find my life extending into another being, his into me. So I multiply my existence. If I love one man in this way, and he love me, I have doubled my delight; if I love two, it is yet further enlarged. So I live in each friend I add to myself; his joys are mine and mine are his; there is a solidarity of affection between us, and his material delights give permanent happiness to me. As a man enlarges his industrial power by material instruments, the wind and the river joined to him by skilful thought, so he enlarges his means of happiness by each friend his affection joins to him. A man with a forty-friend power would be a millionnaire at the treasury of love. The joy of philanthropy is a high delight, worth all the exaltations of St Hugh, and the ecstasies of St Bridget and St Theresa. Compare it with the rapture which Jona- than Edwards anticipates for the " elect n in heaven, looking down upon the damned, and seeing their misery, and making "heaven ring with the praises of God's justice towards the wicked, and his grace towards the saints!" Such is the odds betwixt the religion of nature and the theology of the Christian Church.

There is a great satisfaction in doing good to others,—to men that you never saw, nor will see,— who will never hear of you, but not the less be blessed by your bounty,—even in doing good to the unthankful and the unmerciful.