Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/84

68 use, and which is a symbol of their emancipation from the mere materialism and drudgery of daily life. Rich men attempt to do this with beautiful houses, with costly furniture, with sumptuous food, and "wine too good for the tables of pontiffs," thereby often only thickening and gilding the chain which binds the soul to earth. Some men idealize their life a little with books, music, flowers; with science, poetry, and art; with thought. But such men are comparatively rare, even in Scotland and New England,—two or three in the hundred, not more. In America the cheap newspaper is the most common instrument used for this purpose—a thing not without great value. But the majority of men do this idealizing by the affections, which furnish the chief poetry of their life,—the wife and husband delighting in one another, both in their children. Burns did not exaggerate in his Cotter's Saturday Night, when he painted the labourer's joy:

I have heard a boorish pedant wonder how a woman could spend so many years of her life with little children, and be content! In her satisfaction he found a proof of her "inferiority," and thought her but the "servant of a wooden cradle," herself almost as wooden. But in that gentle companionship she nursed herself and fed a higher faculty than our poor pedant, with his sophomoric wit, had yet brought to consciousness, and out of her wooden cradle got more than he had learned to know. A physician once, with unprofessional impiety, complained that we are not born men, but babies. He did not see the value of infancy as a delight to the mature, and for the education of the heart. At one period of life we need objects of instinctive passion, at another, of instinctive benevolence without passion.

I am not going to undervalue the charm of wisdom, nor the majestic joy which comes from loving principles of right ; but if I could have only one of them, give me the joy of the affections,—my delight in others, theirs in me,—the joy of delighting, rather than the delight of enjoying.