Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/85

Rh Here is a woman with large intellect, and attainments which match her native powers, but with a genius for love, developed in its domestic, social, patriotic, human form, with a wealth of affection which surpasses even her affluence of intellect. Her chief delight is to bless the men who need her blessing. Naturalists carry mind into matter, and seek the eternal truth of God in the perishing forms of the fossil plant, or the evanescent tides of the sea; she carries love into the lanes and kennels of society, to give bread to the needy, eyes to the blind, mind to the ignorant, and a soul to men floating and weltering in this sad pit of society. I do not undervalue intellect in any of its nobler forms, but if God gave me my choice to have either the vast intellect of a Newton, an Aristotle, a Shakspeare, a Homer, the ethical insight of the great legislators, the moral sense of Moses, or Menu, the conscience of men who discover justice and organize unalienable right into human institutions,—or else to take the heroic heart which so loves mankind, and I were to choose what brought its possessor the greatest joy,—I would surely take, not the great head, but the great heart, the power of love before the power of thought.

I know we often envy the sons of genius, men with tall heads and brain preternaturally delicate and nice, thinking God partial. They are not to be envied : the top of Mount Washington is very lofty; it far transcends the neighbouring hills, and overlooks the mountain-tops from the Mississippi to the Atlantic main, and has no fellow from the Northern Sea down to the Mexique Bay. Men look up and wonder at its tall height; but it must take the rude blasts of every winter upon its naked, granite head; its sides are furrowed with the storm. It is of unequalled loftiness, but freezing cold; while in the low valleys and on the mountain's southern slopes the snow melts quick away, early the grass comes green, the flowers lift up their modest, lovely face, and shed their fragrance on the sudden spring. Who shall tell me that intellectual or moral grandeur is higher in the scale of powers than the heart! It is not so. Mind and conscience are great and noble, truth and justice are exceeding dear, but love is dearer and more precious than both.