Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/36

20 we should have the quality of wisdom which they had, but with more intellectual health, strength, and loveliness, more truth and more power to use it, inasmuch as the human race has acquired a greater intellectual development in the two thousand years that have passed since the days of Aristotle and Alexander. The laws which regulate the development of mind, in the individual or the race, are as certain as the laws of matter. Observance thereof is sure to bring certain consequences to the individual, the nation, and mankind. The intellectual peculiarity of a nation is transmitted from age to age, and only disappears when the nation perishes or mingles with some other tribe inferior to itself; then it does not cease, but is spread more thinly over a wider field, and does not appear in its ancient form for years to come. Intellectual talent dies out of a particular family. There are seldom two men of genius of the same name. Stuarts and Tudors, Guelphs and Bourbons, there are in abundance, but only one Luther, Shakspeare, Milton, Cromwell, Burns; only a single Franklin or Washington. But the intellectual power which once rose up in such men does not perish from the race, only from the special family. It comes up in other names, for the fee of all the genius that is born, as well as the achievements won, vests perpetually in man- kind ; not in the special family which holds only its life- estate of talent under the race and of it. The wisdom which this generation shall develope, foster, and mature, will not perish with this age ; it will be added to the spiritual property of mankind, and go down, bequeathed as a rich legacy to such as come after us, all the more valuable because it is given in perpetual entail, a property which does not waste, but greatens in the use. Yet pro- bably no great man of this age will leave a child as great as himself. At death the father's greatness becomes public property to the next generation. The piety of Jesus of Nazareth did not die out of mankind when he gave up the ghost; the second century had more of Christ than the first; there has been a perpetual increase of Socratic excellence ever since the death of the Athenian sage.

This is a remarkable law of Providence, but a law it is; and cheering is it to know that all the good qualities you give example of, not only have a personal immortality in