Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/24

8 cup with fragrant loveliness, who wonders at the mighty cosmic force he sees in these fractions of power,—he is less a man because he does not know it is God's world that he admires, reverences, and worships; ay, far less a man because he does not know he loves and worships God. When he becomes conscious of his own spiritual action, conscious of God, of loving God with mind and conscience, heart and soul, his special love will increase, he will see the defects there are in his piety ; if it be disproportionate, through redundance here or failure there, he can correct the deformity and make his entire inner life harmonious, a well-proportioned whole. Then he feels that he goes in and out, continually, in the midst of the vast forces of the universe, which are only the forces of God; that in his studies, when he attains a truth, he confronts the thought of God; when he learns the right, he learns the will of God laid down as a rule of conduct for the universe ; and when he feels disinterested love, he knows that he partakes the feeling of the infinite God. Then, when he reverences the mighty cosmic force, it is not a blind Fate in an atheistic or a pantheistic world, it is the Infinite God that he confronts, and feels, and knows. He is then mindful of the mind of God, conscious of God's conscience, sensible of God's sentiment, and his own existence is in the Infinite Being of God. Thus he joins into a whole integr state of piety the various parts developed by the several faculties; there is a new growth of each, a new development of all.

If these things be so, then it is plain what relation piety sustains to manly life;—it is the basis of all the higher excellence of man, and when the man is mature, what was instinctive at first becomes a state of conscious love of God.

Now, when this universal fourfold force is once developed and brought to consciousness, and the man has achieved something in this way, his piety may be left to take its natural form of expression, or it may be constrained to take a form not natural. Mankind has made many experiments upon piety ; books of history are full of them. Most of these, as of all the experiments of man in progress, are failures. We aim many times before we hit the mark. The history of religion is not exceptional or peculiar in