Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/31

Rh liis remorse, sows with new seed, and the old desert blossoms like a rose. He is free in his spiritual life, not confined to set forms of thought, of action, or of feeling. He accepts what his mind regards as true, what his con- science decides is right, what his heart deems lovely, and what is holy to his soul ; all else he puts far from him. Though the ancient and the honourable of the earth bid him bow down to them, his stubborn knees bend only at the bidding of his manly soul. His piety is his freedom before God, not his bondage unto men. The toys and child's stories of religion are to him toys and child's stories, but no more. No baby-shoes deform his manly feet.

This piety, thus left to obey its natural law, keeps in sound health, and grows continually more and more. Doing his task, the man makes no more ado about his soul than about his sense. Yet it grows like the oak-tree. He gets continually more love of truth and right and justice, more love of God, and so more love of man. Every faculty becomes continually more. His mind acts after the universal law of the intellect, his conscience according to the universal moral law, his affections and his soul after the universal law thereof, and so he is strong with the strength of God, in this fourfold way communicating with him. With this strengthening of the moral faculties there comes a tranquillity, a calmness and repose, which nothing else can give, and also a beauty of character which you vainly seek elsewhere. When a man has the intellectual, the moral, the affectional part of piety, when he unites them all with conscious love of God, and puts that manifold piety into morality, his eminent piety into philanthropy, he attains the highest form of loveliness which belongs to mortal man. His is the palmy loftiness of man,—such strength, such calmness, and such transcendent loveliness of soul.

I know some men mock at the name of piety; I do not wonder at their scoff; for it has been made to stand as the symbol of littleness, meanness, envy, bigotry, and hypocritical superstition; for qualities I hate to name. Of what is popularly called piety there is no lack; it is abundant everywhere, common as weeds in the ditch, and