Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/45

Rh the next moment. There now, a priest has it in the dust and stamps it out! idle fear! stamp on the lightning of the sky! Of all things truth is the most lasting; invulnerable as God; "of the Eternal coeternal beam," shall we call it an accident of his being, or rather substance of the substance of God, inseparable from Him ? The pyramids may fall, in ages of time the granite be crumbled into dust and blown off by the sirocco of the wilderness; the very mountains, whence they first were hewn, may all vanish, evaporate to the sky and spread over the world; but truth shall still remain, immortal, unchanging, and not growing old. Heaven and earth may pass away, but a truth never. A true word cannot fail from amongst men; it is indorsed by the Almighty, and shall pass current with mankind for ever. Could the armies of the world alter the smallest truth of mathematics; make one and one greater or less than two ? As easily as they can alter any truth, or any falsehood, in morals, in politics, or in religion. A lie is still a lie, a truth a truth.

See the power of some special truth upon a single man. Take an example from a high mode of truth, a truth of religion. Saul of Tarsus sees that God loves the Gentile as well as the Jew. It seems a small thing to see that. Why did men ever think otherwise? Why should not God love the Gentile as well as the Jew? It was impossible that He should do otherwise. Yet this seemed a great truth at that time, the Christian Church dividing upon that matter. It burnt in the bosom of Paul of Tarsus, then a young man. What heroism it wakens in him! what self-denial he can endure! Want, hardships, persecution, the contempt and loathing of his companions and former friends, shipwreck, scourging, prison, death,—all these are nothing to him. A truth has inspired him ; he is eloquent with its new force, his letters powerful. Go where he will he finds foes, the world bristling with peril ; but go where he may he makes friends, makes them by this truth and the heroism it awoke in him. Men saw the new doctrine, and looked back on the old error,—that Jove loved Rome, Pallas Athens, Juno Samos and Carthage most of all, Jehovah Mount Zion, and Baal his Tyrian towns; that each several deity looked grim at all the rest of men, and so must have his own forms and ceremonies, unwelcome to