Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/20

4 nience they hope therefrom. The people of the United States claim to love the unalienable right of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But the long-continued cry of three million slaves, groaning under the American yoke, shows beyond question or cavil that it is not the universal and unalienable right which they love, but only the selfish advantage it affords them. If you love the right as right, for itself, because it is absolutely just and beautiful to your conscience, then you will no more deprive another of it than submit yourself to be deprived thereof. Even the robber will fight for his own. The man who knows no better rests in the selfish love of the private use of a special right.

The Heart contemplates God as manifested in love, for love is the universal category of affectional cognition. To love God with the heart, is to love him as manifested in love; it is to love Love, not for its convenience, but for itself, because it is absolutely beautiful and lovely to the heart.

Here I need not reiterate what has already been twice said, of mind and of conscience.

Love of God as love, then, is the affectional part of piety, and lies at the basis of all affectional excellence. The mind and the conscience are content with ideas, with the true and the right, while the heart demands not ideas, but Beings, Persons; and loves them. It is one thing to desire the love of a person for your own use and convenience, and quite different to have your personal delight in him, and desire him to have his personal delight in you. From the nature of the case, as persons are concrete and finite, man never finds the complete satisfaction of his affectional nature in them, for no person is absolutely lovely, none the absolute object of the affections. But as the mind and conscience use the finite things to help learn infinite truth and infinite right, and ultimately rest in that as their absolute object, so our heart uses the finite persons whom we reciprocally love as golden letters in the book of life, whereby we learn the absolutely lovely, the infinite object of the heart. As the philosopher has the stars of heaven, each lovely in itself, whereby to learn the absolute truth of science,—as the moralist has the events of human