Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/96

80 with persons, whom it is their function to love, travel ever on to wider and wider spheres, joying in the men they love, but always seeking the perfect object with which they may be contented and have the absolute joy of the heart. To think truth, to will justice, to feel love, is the highest act respectively of the intellectual, moral, and affectional powers of man, which seek the absolutely true, just, and lovely, as the object of their natural desire.

The soul has its own functions. God is the object thereof. As the mind and conscience by their normal activity bring truth and justice to human consciousness, so the soul makes us conscious of God.

We see what intellectual, moral, and affectional creations have come from the action of the mind, the conscience, and the heart of man ; we see the human use thereof and joy therein. But the religious faculty has been as creative and yet more powerful, overmastering all the other powers of man. The profoundest study of man's affairs, or the hastiest glance thereat, shows the power of the soul for good and ill. The phenomena of man's religious history are as varied and important as they are striking. The surface of the world is dotted all over with the temples which man has built in his acts of reverence; religious sentiments and ideas are deeply ploughed into the history of every tribe that has occupied time or peopled space. Consider mankind as one man, immortal and not growing old, universal history as his biography; study the formation of his religious consciousness, the gradual growth of piety in all its forms, normal or monstrous; note his stumblings in the right way, his wanderings in the wrong, his penitence, his alarm and anxiety, his remorse for sin, his successive attainments of new truth, new justice, and new love, the forms in which he expresses his inward experience,—and what a strange, attractive spectacle this panorama of man's religious history presents to the thoughtful man. The religious action of a child begins early; but like all early activity it is unconscious. We cannot remember that; we can only recollect what we have known in the form of consciousness, or, at best, can only dimly remember what lay dimly and half conscious in us, though the effects