Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/111

98 and his manhood. He ripens what he grew. The quantity and the quality of his life are the result of all his time. If he has been faithful to his better nature, true to his conscience, and his heart, and his soul,—in his old age he often reaps a most abundant reward in the richest delight of his own quiet consciousness. Private selfishness is less now than ever before. He loves the Eternal Justice of God, the great Higher Law. Once his hot blood tempted him, and he broke perhaps that law ; now he thinks thereof with grief at the wrong he made others suffer: though he clasps his hands and thanks God for the lesson he has learned even from his sin. He heeds now the great attraction whereby all things gravitate towards God. He knows there is a swift Justice for nations and for men, and he says to the youth: "Rejoice, young man, in thy youth! Let thy heart cheer thee I But know thou that for all these things God will bring thee into account. Hear the sum of the whole matter: Love God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole of man."

In the old saint, perhaps instinctive conscience, like his natural eye and ear, has grown more feeble. But yet the well-developed moral sense, strengthened by inward and outward observation, and enforced by the momentum which long habit gives, endows him with greater moral power than he ever had before;

You cannot swerve him from the right. What bribe could make old Washington unjust, or Franklin false to his love for the slave, the sick, the poor, for all men? In long time, our good old man has got a great estate of righteousness, which no genius could have accumulated in a short period. His affections now are greater than before; yet it is not the mere power of instinctive affection—the connubial instinct which loves a mate, or the parental instinct which loves a child; but a general human, reflective, volitional love, not sharpened by animal desire, not narrowed by affiliated bounds, but coming of his freedom, not his bondage. Of mere instinctive affection he has perhaps less than before. That fades with the age which needs it,