Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/327

Rh and beauty, wherewith thou feedest us from age to age. We bless thee for this large conscience, which seeks for justice, wherewith thou dost enlighten our eyes and quicken what is innermost within us. We thank thee for these self-denying affections, which reach out unto friends and kinsfolk, unto lover and beloved, parent and child, to countrymen, yea, which spread out their arms to those that are needy everywhere. We thank thee for this religious faculty, which through the darkness looks up to thee and is filled with thy light, and we bless thee that in our hour of sorrow it brings to us exceeding tranquillity and hope and strength. We thank thee for the dear and tender joys which are born in our innermost of consciousness, which dwell there and fill the whole temple of our inner life with that presence which cannot be put by, which is a blessing to us by darkness and by day. We thank thee, Father in heaven, for all the good which has come from these great talents thou hast blessed us withal. We thank thee that in every age and every land thou givest open vision of thyself to thy children, and in the things that are seen mirrorest thine own image, thou whom the mortal eye cannot see, but whom our heart enfolds within itself, which is blessed by thy touch. We thank thee for great philosophers and prophets and poets, mighty men and women, whom thou hast blessed with large genius, who in many an age have gathered truth and justice, and taught love, and lived blameless piety ; we thank thee for the revelations of manhood they have made to us, and the revelations of thine own spirit which through them have shone upon our heart. And for the greatest of them all, as we fondly dream, we thank thee, — for him who taught so much of truth, and lived so much of piety in his soul, and blameless benevolence in his outward life ; we bless thee for his words of soberness, for his life of sacrifice and of duty, and all the gladness and joy which therefrom has come to the sons and daughters of men. We thank thee not less for the millions of unremembered souls of men and women, who in their common callings of earth were faithful to the light which shone upon them, howsoever dim; and we bless thee that by their stripes we are healed, and we also have entered into their labours, and rejoice in the heritage which their toil has won and bequeathed to us.