Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/79

Rh tate to break up a thousand homes in Africa, that he might adorn his own in New England. The lion, the tiger, the hyena, each is kind to his whelps,—for instinctive love affects the beast also. No man has universal love ; conscience gives the rule thereof, and so in applying justice applies God's universal love to that special case. Seek to exercise love without justice, and you injure some one. The same form of affection appears on a larger scale in the members of a class in society, or a sect in religion; it leads to kindliness within the circle of its range, but intense cruelty is often practised beyond that limit. All the aristocracies of the world, the little sects of Christendom, and the great sects of the human race, furnish examples of this.

What is called patriotism is another form of the same limited love,—a culture of the affections without regard to justice. Hence it has been held patriotic to build up your country by the ruin of another land, to love Jacob and hate Esau. This feeling is of continual occurrence. "Lands intersected by a narrow with abhor each other;" cities that are rivals in trade seek to ruin each other; nations do the same.

In all these cases, where love is limited to the family, class, sect, or nation the aim is this : Mutuality of love within the narrow circle ; without its range, mutuality of selfishness. Thus love is deemed only a privilege of convention and for a few, arbitrarily limited by caprice; not a right of nature and for all, the extension thereof to be limited only by the power, not the will, of the man who loves. All the above are common forms of limited affection. The domestic, social, ecclesiastical, and political institutions of the world, the educational and commercial machinery of the world, tend to produce this result. All the religions of the world have practically fostered this mistake, by starting with the idea, that God loved best the men who worshipped Him in a certain conventional form.

But this expansive and centrifugal power may be culti- vated to the neglect of natural and well-proportioned self-love. This also is a defect, for the conservative or self-preserving power is quite as necessary as the beneficent and expansive power. Impenetrability is the necessary concomitant of attraction. The individual is first an integer, then a fraction of society ; he must keep his per-