Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/140

Rh beauty before sickness and deformity, before pain and death, not less naturally does man, at last, reject all but truth in things intellectual, all save justice in things moral, and holds fast to holiness and love. Our history is not a retreat, it is a march forward. Mythology fancies a "fall;" history records an ascension. The tempting devil disappears—a theologic fancy of the younger age; the guiding! Providence remains a scientific fact. Nothing is more clearly demonstrated than the continual progress of humanity, I mean, the regular growth of every excellence. Let a man make a pictorial view of any special art—the trade of the smith, farmer, carpenter, clothier, sailor; or of any science—arithmetic, astronomy, chemistry; or of morality and religion; and since the historic age began, see what a continual progress there has been! Combine all these into one grand panorama of humanity, and lo, what a monument of our greatness, what a prophecy of our destination it affords! Man started with nothing; in one or two thousand generations see what he has done; this naked and penniless Adam turns out the thriftiest child of God. Behold his material and spiritual estate!

The religious teacher will set forth the ideal of what man should be; it is the prayer of human nature, through the imagination ascending from every human faculty, which longs for its complete and perfect development. What a future this ideal foretells, to be made by man, as the past has been, partly by his instinctive action outrunning his personal will, partly by his conscious calculation, setting the purpose, and thereto devising means! This is plain—there must be a destination proportionate to the nature of man, a fulfilment of the soul's desires. By the facts of the past and present, history shows that it is likely to be so, and by the facts of consciousness—intuitive and demonstrative—by deduction from the idea of a perfect God, human nature shows that it must be so and shall. Indeed the infinite perfection of God is collateral security for the promise, made in our nature itself, that normal desire shall ultimately have its satisfaction, and the ideal of man shall, one day, be the actual of humanity. Man's immortality must be dwelt upon. This can be shown not by things outside of us, not at all by quoting stories which cannot be true, but by the development of