Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/37

Rh you beyond the grave, but a national, even a human, im- mortality on earth, and, while they bless you in heaven, are likewise safely invested in your brother man, and shall go down to the last posterity, blessing your nation and all mankind. So the great men of antiquity continue to help us,—Moses, Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato,—not to dwell upon the name dearest of all. These men and their fellows, known to all or long since forgotten of mankind,—the aristocracy of heaven, whose patent of nobility dates direct from God,—they added to the spiritual power of mankind. The wisdom they inherited or acquired was a personal fief, which at their death reverted to the human race. Not a poor boy in Christendom, not a man of genius, rejoicing in the plenitude of power, but is greater and nobler for these great men ; not barely through his knowledge of the ex- ample, but because, so to say, they raised the temperature of the human world. For, as there is a physical temperature of the interstellar spaces, betwixt sun and sun, which may be called the temperature of the universe, so is there a spiritual temperature of the interpersonal spaces, a certain common temperature of spirit, not barely personal, not national alone, but human and of the race, which may be called the temperature of mankind. On that in general we all depend, as on our family in special, or in particular upon our personal genius and our will. Those great men added wisdom to mankind, brought special truths to consciousness, which now have spread throughout the enlightened nations of the world, and penetrate progressively the human mass, giving mankind continual new power. So shall you see an iron bar become magnetic; first it was a single atom of the metal which caught the electric influence, spark by spark; that atom could not hold the subtle fire, whose nature was to spread, and so one atom gave the spark to the next, and soon it spread through the whole, till the cold iron, which before seemed dead as stone, is all magnetic, acquires new powers, and itself can hold its own, yet magnetize a thousand bars if rightly placed. According to his nature man loves truth with a pure and disinterested love, the strongest intellectual affection.