Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/226

210 baptismal welcome here. And when, out of the circle that twines you round with loving hearts beloved, some one is taken, born out of your family, not into it, a conscious piety will seem to send celestial baptism to the heaven- born soul. And when the mists of age gather about your eye, when the silver cord of life is loosed and the golden bowl at the fountain begins to break, with what a blessed triumph shall you close your mortal sense to this romantic moon and this majestic sun, to the stars of earth that bloom below, the starry flowers that burn above, to open your soul on glory which the eye has not seen, nor yet the heart of man been competent to dream!

Simeon the Stylite lived on the top of the pillar at Antioch for seven-and-thirty years, for the sake of being nearer to God and holding communion with Him. Some men shut themselves up in convents and nunneries under vows of perpetual asceticism, thinking that God will come into the soul the easier if the flesh be worn thin, the body looped and windowed with bad usage and unnatural hard fare. All the monasteries are designed to produce communion with God. "He dwells," say the priests, "not in the broad way and the green, but in the stillness of the