Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/75

Rh and parental love; as friendship, love of a few who reciprocrate the feeling; as charity, love of the needy ; as patriotism, love of your nation ; and a philanthropy, the love of all mankind without respect to kin or country. In all these cases love is the same thing in kind, but modified specifically by other emotions which connect themselves with it. Love is the piety of the affections.

Of course there are not only forms of love, where the quality is modified, but degrees which measure the different quantity thereof. The degree depends on the subject, and also on the object, of love.

There is a state of consciousness in which we wish no ill to a man, but yet wish him no good. That is the point of affectional indifference. The first remove above that may be regarded as the lowest degree of love, hardly worthy of the name, a sort of zobphytic affection. You scarcely know whether to call it love or not.

The highest degree of love is that state of feeling in which you are willing to abandon all, your comfort, convenience, and life, for the sake of another, to sacrifice your delight in him to his delight in you, and to do this not merely by volition, as an act of conscience, and in obedience to a sense of duty,—not merely by impulse, in obedience to blind feeling, as an act of instinct,—but to do all this consciously, yet delightedly, with a knowledge of the consequences, by a movement which is not barely instinctive, and not merely of the will, but spontaneous; to do all this not merely out of gratitude for favours received, for a reward paid in advance, nor for the sake of happiness in heaven, a recompense afterwards; with no feeling of grateful obligation, no wish for a recompense, but from pure, entire, and disinterested affection.

This highest ideal degree of love is sometimes attained, but, like all the great achievements of human nature, it is rare. There are few masterpieces in sculpture, painting, architecture, in poetry or music. The ideal and actual are seldom the same in any performance of mankind. It is rarely that human nature rises to its highest ideal mark; some great hearts notch the mountains and leave their line high up above the heads of ordinary men,—a history and a prophecy. Yet the capacity for this degree of love belongs to the nature of man as man. The human excellence which