Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/40

24 weapon of the human mind, an instrument half made on purpose, and half given without our thought.

This love of truth is the natural and instinctive piety of the mind. In studying the facts of nature, material or human, I study the thought of God; for in the world of real things a fact is the direct speech of the Father. Words make up the language of men; facts and ideas are the words of God, his universal language to the English- man and the Chinese, in which He speaks from all eternity to all time. Man made "in the image of God" loves his Father's thought, and is not contented till he hears that speech; then he is satisfied. All intellectual error is but the babble of the baby-man. Every truth which I know is one point common to my consciousness and the con- sciousness of God; in this we approach, and, so far as that goes, God's thought is my thought, and we are at one. Mankind will not be content till we also are conscious of the universe, and have mastered this Bible of God writ in the material world, a perpetual lesson for the day.

I cannot think we value wisdom high enough; not in proportion to other things for more vulgar use. We prize the material results of wisdom more than the cause which produces them. Let us not undervalue the use. What is it which gives Christendom its rank in the world? What gives Old England or New England her material delight,—our comfortable homes, our mills and ships and shops, these iron roads which so cover the land? It is not the soil, hard and ungrateful; not the sky, cold and stormy half the year; it is the educated mind, the practical wisdom of the people. The Italian has his sunnier sky, his laboured land, which teems with the cultured luxuriance of three thousand years. Our outfit was the wilderness and our head. God gave us these, and said, " Subdue the earth;" and we have toiled at the problem, not quite in vain. The mind is a universal tool, the abstract of all instruments; it concretizes itself in the past, present, and future weapons of mankind.

We value wisdom chiefly for its practical use, as the convenience of a weapon, not the function of a limb; and