Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/239

Rh walk serenely on, along the high table-land of mortal life, and though continually greatening their connubial love and joy, it is without the early ecstasy.

Men sometimes seek to have their daily prayer high and ecstatic as their highest hour and walk with God; it cannot be; it should not be. Some shut themselves up in convents to make religion their business,—all their life; to make an act of prayer their only act. They always fail; their religion dwindles into ritual service, and no more; their act of prayer is only kneeling with the knees and talking talk with windy tongues. A Methodist, in great ecstasy of penitence or fear, becomes a member of a church. He all at once is filled with rapturous delight; religious joy blossoms in his face, and glitters in his eye. How glad is the converted man!

But by and by his rapture dies away, and he is astonished that he has no such ecstasy as before. He thinks that he has "fallen from grace," has "grieved away" the Holy Ghost, and tries by artificial excitement to bring back what will not come without a new occasion. Certain religious convictions once made my heart spring in my bosom. Now it is not so. The fresh leaping of the heart will only come from a fresh conquest of new truth. The old man loves his wife a thousand times better than when, for the first time, he kissed her gracious mouth; but his heart burns no longer as when he first saw his paradise in her reciprocating eye. The tree of religious consciousness is not in perpetual blossom,—but now in leaf, now flower, now fruit.

It is a common error to take no heed of this voluntary communion with God, to live intent on business or on pleasure, careful, troubled about many things, and seldom heed the one thing needed most; to take that as it comes. If all this mortal life turned out just as we wished it, this error would be still more common; only a few faculties would get their appropriate discipline. Men walking only on a smooth and level road use the same muscles always,