Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/233

Rh to know of God. For communion with my God I have other faculties than what He gives to stone and pencil, hand and fly.

Put together all these things which are not body, and call them Spirit : this spirit as a whole is dependent on God, for creation first, and for existence ever since; it lives only by communion with Him. So far as I am a body, I obviously depend on God, and am no more self- created and self-sufficing than the pencil or the fly. So far as I am a, spirit, I depend equally on Him. Should God withdraw Himself or any of His qualities from my mind, I could not think; from conscience, I should know nothing of the right; from the heart, there could be no love ; from the soul, then there could be no holiness, no faith in Him that made it. Thus the very existence of the spirit is a dependence on God, and so far a communion with Him.

I cannot wholly separate my spirit from this communion; for that would be destruction of the spirit, annihilation, which is in no man's power. Only the Infinite can create or annihilate an atom of matter or a monad of spirit. There is a certain amount of communion of the spirit with God, which is not conscious ; that lies quite beyond my control. I "break into the bloody house of life," and my spirit rushes out of the body, and while the static and dynamic laws of nature reassume their sway over my material husk, rechanging it to dust, still I am, I depend, and so involuntarily commune with God. Even the popular theology admits this truth, for it teaches that the living wicked still commune with God through pain and wandering and many a loss; and that the wicked dead commune with Him through hell against their will, as with their will the heavenly saints through heavenly joy.

I cannot end this communion with my God; but I can increase it, greaten it largely, if I will. The more I live my higher normal life, the more do I commune with God. If I live only as mere body, I have only corporeal and unconscious communion, as a mineral, a vegetable, an animal, no more. As children, we all begin as low as this. The child unborn or newly born has no self consciousness, knows nothing of its dependence, its spontaneous communion with its God, whereon by laws it depends for being and continuance. As we outgrow our babyhood we are