Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/221

Rh ment, but almost a limb; the letters are formed even without a thought. Without the form, you have the effect thereof.

If there be piety in the heart, and it be allowed to live and grow and attain its manly form, it will quicken every noble faculty in man. Morality will not be dry, and charity will not be cold; the reason will not. grovel with mere ideas, nor the understanding with calculations; the shaft of wit will lose its poison, merriment its levity, common life its tedium. Disappointment, sorrow, suffering, will not break the heart, which will find soothing and comfort in its saddest woe. The consciousness of error, that vexes oft the noble soul, will find some compensation for its grief. Kemorse, which wounds men so sadly and so sore, will leave us the sweetest honey, gleaned up from the flowers we trod upon when we should have gathered their richness, and happily will sting us out of our offence.

The common test of Christianity is not the natural sacrament; it is only this poor conventional thing. Look at this. The land is full of Bibles. I am glad of it. I am no worshipper of the Bible, yet I reverence its wisdom, I honour its beauty of holiness, and love exceedingly the tranquil trust in God which its great authors had. Some of the best things that I have ever learned from man this book has taught me. Think of the great souls in this Hebrew Old Testament ; of the two great men in the New,—Jesus, who made the great religious motion in the world's parliament, and Paul, who supported it! I am glad the Bible goes everywhere. But men take it for master, not for help; read it as a sacrament, not to get a wiser and a higher light. They worship its letter, and the better spirit of Moses, of Esaias, of the Holy Psalms, so old and yet so young, so everlasting in their beauteous faith in God,—the sublime spirit of one greater than the temple, and Lord of the Sabbath, who scorned to put the new wine of God into the old and rotten bags of men—that is not in Christendom. O, no! men do not ask for that. The yeasty soul would rend asunder tradition's leathern bags. Worship of Bibles never made men write Bibles; it hinders us from living them. Worship no things for that; not the created, but, Creator! let us worship Thee. Catholicism is worship of a church, instead of God; Protestantism is