Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/98

82 flective intellect the immediate emotions of the soul. When language is a clumsy instrument, men try to carve in stone what they fail to express in speech. Is the soul directly conscious of a superhuman power? they seek to legitimate the feeling in the mind, and so translate it to a thought; at least they legitimate it to the senses, and make it a thing. This vague, mysterious, superhuman something, before it is solidified into deity, let me call The Divine. Man does not know what it is. "It is not myself," says he. "What is it, then? Some outward thing?" He takes the outward thing which seems most wondrous to himself,—a reptile, beast, bird, insect; an element, the wind, the lightning, the sun, the moon, a planet, or a star. Outward things embody his inward feeling; but while there are so many elements of confusion within him, no one embodiment is enough; he must have many, each one a step beyond the other. His feeling becomes profounder, his thought more clear. At length he finds that man is more mighty than the elements, and seeks to consolidate the Divine in man, and has personifications thereof, instead of his primitive embodiments in Nature. Then his feeling of the Divine becomes an idea of Deity; he has his personal gods, with all the accidents of human personality,—the passions, feelings, thoughts, mistakes, and all the frailties of mortal men. Age after age this work goes on; the human idea of God has its metempsychosis, and transmigrates through many a form, rising higher at every step until this day. In studying mathematics man has used for counters the material things of earth, has calculated by the help of pebbles from the beach, learned the decimal system from his ten fingers, and wonders of abstract science from the complicated diagrams of the sky. So he has used reptiles, beasts, and all the elements and orbs of nature, in studying his sentiment of God, transferring each excellence of Nature to the Divine, and then each excellence of man. Nature is the rosary of man's prayer. The successive embodiments and personifications of God in matter, animals, or men were in religion what the hypotheses of Thales and Ptolemy, Galileo and Kepler, were in science,—helps to attain a more general form of truth. Every idol-fetish, every embodiment of a conception of God in matter, every