Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/97

Rh thereof may be as lasting as our mortal life. You see the tendency to the superhuman in quite little children asking, "But who made God?" the child's causality heedlessly leaping at the Infinite, he having a dim sentiment of the Maker of all itself unmade. You have seen little babies, early deprived of their mother, involuntarily and by instinct feeling with their ill-shapen mouths after what nature pro- vided for their nourishment. So in our childhood as in- voluntarily and instinctively do we feel with our souls after the Infinite God, often, alas ! to be beguiled by our nurses with some sop of a deity which fills our mouth for the time, and keeps us from perishing. Perhaps a few of you remember a time when you had a sentiment—it was more a feeling than a thought—of a vague, dim, mysterious some- what, which lay at the bottom of all things, was above all, about all, and in all, which you could not comprehend nor yet escape from. You seemed a part of it, or it of you ; you wondered that you could not see with your eyes, nor hear with your ears, nor touch with your hands, what you yet felt and longed after with such perplexity of indistinctness. Sometimes you loved it; sometimes you feared. You dared not name it, or if you did, no one word was name enough for so changeable a thing. Now you felt it in the sunshine, then in the storm; now it gave life, then it took life away. You connected it with all that was strange and uncommon; now it was a great loveliness, then an ugliness of indefinite deformity. In a new place you missed it at first; but it soon came back, travelling with the child, a constant companion at length.

All men do not remember this, I think; only a few, in whom religious consciousness began early. But we have all of us been through this nebulous period of religious history, when the soul had emotions for which the mind could not frame adequate ideas.

You see the same phenomena drawn on a large scale in the history of ancient nations, whose monuments still attest these facts of consciousness ; you find nations at this day still in this nebulous period of religion, the Divine not yet resolved to Deity. Sphinxes and pyramids are fossil remains of old facts of consciousness which you and I and every man have reproduced. Savages are baby nations, feeling after God, and trying to express with their re-