Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/169

156 is not theory alone, it is plain fact; you see examples of it everywhere. My consciousness of God comes into every relation that I have in life—to my business, to my pleasure, to my affection. Go into rigid Calvinistic churches; look at the faces of men, listen to their prayers, read their hymns, see what passages are selected from the Bible; then go with these men to their homes, and see how their children are brought up in fear, in trembling, and with dread of God,—counting religion as something unnatural,—and see how a mistake in the idea of God comes out and colours all the man's life. Then, to go to the opposite extreme, take the atheistic party which has risen up in our times, read their books, and see them declare that the idea of immortality is the greatest curse left for mankind,—not the common idea, but any idea of immortality,—hear them proclaim that the great function of the philosopher is to re-establish the flesh in its domineering over the spirit of man, and you see how their absence of the idea of God colours their consciousness and penetrates into every relation. But if I know the infinite God, then I know that He is perfect cause and perfect providence, and that He makes and administers the world of matter from perfect motives, of perfect material, for a perfect purpose, and as a perfect means thereto, and that the perfect motive is love, the desire to bless everything that he makes; then I am sure that the end is foreseen and provided for, that all the action of the universe, whether right or wrong, of the great universe as a whole, and of you and me, the little atoms which compose it, of each nation, community, family, and individual—I am sure that all this has been foreseen and provided for, and so administered by the Infinite God that there shall be no absolute evil befalling the greatest genius or the humblest idiot; that no mote which peoples the sun's beams, that no mortal man, whether he be Judas the betrayer or Jesus the crucified, shall fail of never-ending bliss at last. Discipline there is, and must be, but only as means to the noblest and most joyous end. This I say I am sure of, for it follows logically from the very idea of the infinite perfect God. Nay, the religious instinct anticipates induction, and declares this with the spontaneous womanly logic of human nature itself.