Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/162

Rh store the wanting limb, or to bring back the dead to life! The good word of a live minister will probably be welcomed first by some choice maiden or matron, the evening star of that Heaven which is soon to blaze with masculine glory all night long. What individuals he may raise up! What schools he may establish, and educate therein a generation of holy ones! If noble, how he may stamp his feeling and his ideas on the action of the age, and long after death will reappear—a glorious resurrection this—in the intelligence, the literature, the philanthropy; in the temperance, and purity, and piety of the place! How many towns in America thus keep the soul of some good minister, some farmer or mechanic, lawyer or doctor—oftenest of all, of some good religious woman, long after her tomb has become undistinguishable in the common soil of graves? And how do we honour such?

All things betoken better times to come. There was never so grand an age as this—how swiftly moves mankind! But how much better we can do! Religious emotion once flowed into the gothic architecture of Europe, the fairest flower of human art—little blossoms of painting and sculpture, philosophy, eloquence, and poetry, all hidden, and yet kept within this great compound posy of man's history. The Catholic Church has her great composers in stone, artists in speech, and actors in marble; the Protestant its great composers in philosophy and literature, with their melody of thought, their harmony of ideas. One day there must be a church of mankind, whose composers of humanity shall think men and women into life, and build with living stones ; their painting, their sculpture, their architecture, the manhood of the individual, the virtue of the family and community; their philosophy, their eloquence and song, the happiness of the nation, the peace and good will of all the world.

Oh, young man, gird your loins for this work; spare