Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/82

66 have any notion of justice or of truth. The spontaneous development of the heart in children is one of the most beautiful phenomena in nature. The child has self-love, but no selfishness; his nebulous being not yet solidified to the impenetrability which is to come. His first joys are animal, the next affectional, the delight of loving and of being loved! Indeed, with most men the affections take the lead of all the spiritual powers ; only they act in a confined sphere of the family, class, sect, or nation. Men trust the heart more than the head. The mass of men have more confidence in a man of great affection than in one of great thought; pardon is commonly popular, mercy better loved than severity. Men rejoice when the murderer is arrested; but shout at his acquittal of the crime. The happiness of the greater part of men comes from affectional more than intellectual or moral sources. Hence the abund- ant interest felt in talk about persons, the popular fondness for personal anecdotes, biographies, ballads, love-stories, and the like. The mass of men love the person of their great man, not his opinions, and care more to see his face and hear his voice than to know his ideas of truth and of justice. It is so with religious teachers. Men sympathize with the person before they take his doctrine. Hence the popular fondness for portraits of great men, for their autographs, and even for relics. The person of Jesus of Nazareth has left a much greater impression on the hearts of men, than his doctrines have made on the mind and conscience of Christendom. For this reason, religious pictures preserve scenes which have nothing to do with the truth or the right that the man represented, but are merely personal details, often destitute of outward beauty, of no value to the mind, of much to the affections. This explains the popular fondness for stories and pictures of the sufferings of martyrs. A crucifix is nothing to the mind and conscience;—how much to the heart of Christendom! Hence, too, men love to conceive of God in the person of a man.

Now and then you find a man of mere intellectual or moral power, who takes almost his whole delight in the exercise of his mind or conscience. Such men are rare and wonderful, but by no means admirable.