Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/78

62 themselves, their love being greater than their selfishness. This is so common that it seems a rule of nature,—that the affectional is a little stronger than the moral instinct, and where both have received due culture, and there is still a collision between the two, that mercy is the law. But here no private love should prevail against right, and only universal love come in to its aid to supply the defect of conscience. Brutus, so the story goes, finds his son committing a capital offence, and orders his head struck off, sacrificing his private and paternal love to his universal and human love of justice, his love of a special man to his love of what is right for all men. This is as it should be. Conscience may be cultivated in an exclusive manner to the neglect of the affections. Then conscience is despotic; the man always becomes hard and severe, a stern father, a cold neighbour, a harsh judge, a cruel magistrate. He will err often, but always on the side of vengeance. Love improves the quality of finite morality, for it is the same as divine justice. Absolute justice and absolute love are never antagonistic, but identical. The affections may be cultivated at the expense of con- science. This often happens with such as limit the range of their love to a few friends, to their own family, class, or nation. The world is full of examples of this. Here is one who loves her own family with intense love, — her husband, children, grandchildren, and collateral relations,—the love always measured by their propinquity to her. Like the crow in the fable, she thinks her own young the fairest of the fair, heedless of their vulgarity, and worldly and ignoble materialism. She is generous to them, no she-crow more bounteous to her young, but no hawk was ever more niggardly to all beyond. Here neglect of justice and scorn of conscience have corrupted her affections; and her love is only self-love,—for she loves these but as limbs of herself,—and has degenerated into selfishness in a wider form, not simple, but many-headed selfishness.

I once knew of a man who was a slave-trader on the Atlantic, and a proverb for cruelty among the felons of that class; he was rich, and remarkably affectionate in his own family; he studied the comfort of his daughters and wife, was self-denying for their sake. Yet he did not hesi-