Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/347

Rh sparrow that falls, and holds in thy hand the wandering orbs of heaven.

We thank thee also for this great, glorious human nature which thou hast blessed us with. We thank thee for the body, so curiously and wonderfully made, fitted for all the various purposes of human need; and we thank thee for this spiritual part which thou hast breathed into this mortal.

We bless thee for this toilsome and far-reaching mind, which gives us dominion over the earth beneath our feet, and makes the winds and the waters serve us, which tames the lightning of heaven, and learns the time from the stars by night and the sun by day. We thank thee for that great world of artistic use and beauty, and of scientific truth, which the human mind has made to blossom from out this foodful ground and these starry heavens wherewith thou girdest us about.

We bless thee for the moral sense, hungering and thirsting after righteousness, and that thou fillest our conscience with thine own justice, enlightening our pathway with the lamp of right, shining with its ever unchanging beams, to light alike the way of thy commandments and of human toil upon the earth.

We thank thee for these dear affections, which set the solitary in families, and of twain make one, and thence bring many forth, peopling the world with infantile gladness, which grows up to manhood and to womanhood in all their various forms. We thank thee for that unselfish and self-forgetful love which toils for the needy, which is eyes for the blind, and feet for the lame, and is wisdom for the fool, and spreads civilization all round the world, giving freedom to the slave and light to those who have long sat in darkness.

We thank thee for this overmastering religious faculty, the flower of intellect and conscience and the affections, and we bless thee that by this we know thee instinctively, and have a joyous delight in thy presence, openings our flower, whereinto thou sheddest gentle dew, warming it with all thy fatherly and motherly love, blessing us from day to day, from age to age.

We thank thee for the great triumphs of the human race, that while thou createst us individually as little babies, and