Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/77

Rh Selfishness is the excess of this self-love; no longer merely conservative of myself, I become invasive, destructive of others, and appropriate what is theirs to my own purposes. Love is the greater gravitation which unites me to others; the expansive and centrifugal power that extends my personality, and makes me find my delight in others, and desire them to have theirs in me. In virtue of this I feel for the sorrows of another man; they become, in some measure, my sorrows, just in proportion to the degree of my love; his joys also are my joys just in the same degree; I am gladdened with his delights, honoured in his honours; and so my consciousness is multiplied by all the persons that I love, for my affectional personality is extended to them all, and with a degree of power exactly proportionate to my degree of love. So affection makes one man into many men, as it were.

The highest action of any power is in combination with all the rest. Yet there is much imperfect action of the faculties, working severally, not jointly. The affections may act independent of the conscience, as it of them. It is related that an eminent citizen of Athens had a son who committed an offence for which the law demanded the two eyes of the offender; the father offered one of his to save one of his son's. Here his heart, not his conscience, prompted the deed. When the affections thus control the conscience, we have the emotion called Mercy, which is the preponderance of love for a person, not love for right, of love for the concrete man over the abstract idea of justice. In a normal condition, it seems to me that love of persons is a little in advance of love of the abstract right, and that spontaneous love triumphs over voluntary morality; the heart carries the day before the conscience. This is so in most women, who are commonly fairer examples of the natural power of both the moral and affectional faculties, and represent the natural tendency of human nature better than men. I think they seldom sacrifice a person to an abstract rule of conduct; or at least, if there is a collision between conscience and the heart, with them the heart carries the day. Non-resistants, having a rule of conduct which forbids them to hurt another, will yet do this for a wife or child, though not for