Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/51

Rh it than I fear for God. Politics is the science of exigencies. The eternal truth of things is the exigency which controls the science of men as the science of matter. Depend upon it, the Infinite God is one of the exigencies not likely to be disregarded in the ultimate events of human development. Truth shall fail out of geometry and politics at the same time; only we learn first the simpler forms of truth. Now folly, passion, and fancied interest pervert the eye, which cannot always fail to see. Truth is the object of the intellect ; by human wisdom we learn the thought of God, and are inspired by his mind,—not all of us with the same mode, or form, or quantity of truth; but each shall have his own, proportionate to his native powers and to the use he makes thereof. Love of truth is the intellectual part of piety. Wisdom is needful to complete and manly religion ; a thing to be valued for itself, not barely for its use. Love of the use will one day give place to love of truth itself.

To keep the body's law brings health and strength, and in long ages brings beauty too ; to keep the laws of mind brings in the higher intellectual health and strength and loveliness, as much nobler than all corporeal qualities as the mind is nobler than the muscles it controls. Truth will follow from the lawful labour of the mind, and serve the great interest of men. Many a thousand years hence, when we are forgotten, when both the Englands have perished out of time, and the Anglo-Saxon race is only known as the Cherethites and Pelethites,—nothing national left but the name,—the truths we have slowly learned will be added to the people that come after us; the great political truth of America will go round the world, and clothe the earth with greenness and with beauty. All the power of mind that we mature and give examples of shall also survive; in you and me it will be personally immortal,—a portion of our ever- widening consciousness, though all the earthly wisdom of Leibnitz or Aristotle must soon become a single drop in the heavenly ocean of the sages whom death has taught ; but it will be not less enduring on the earth, humanly immortal ; for the truths you bring to light are dropped into the world's wide treasury,—where Socrates and Kant have cast in but two mites,