Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/171

158 church,—and you are frightened with the ghastly image of God which is gibbeted before you in horror.

But, in addition to this sense of permanent security, the piety I speak of famishes the highest, the deepest, and the most intimate delight which mortal man knows or can know here on the earth. I am very far from denying the value of other forms of delight, even of those which come wholly from the world of matter. Every sense has its function, and that function is attended with pleasure, with joy. All these natural and normal delights ought to be enjoyed by every man; it is a sullenness toward God not to rejoice and thus appreciate his beautiful world when we I can. St Bernard walked all day, six or seven hundred years ago, by the shores of the Lake of Geneva, with one of the most glorious prospects in the whole world before I him—mountain, lake, river, clouds, gardens, everything to bless the eye—and that monk never saw a thing all day long. He was thinking about the Trinity, and when he reached home some one spoke to him of the beauty he must have seen; and the austere, sour-hearted monk said he had seen nothing. He thought it was a merit, and his chroniclers record it in his praise. It always seemed to me rather impious in the stout-hearted man, a proud fling at God, which Voltaire would have' been ashamed of. Mr Beecher, with more wholesome piety, says in his poetic way, "The sweet-brier is country cousin to the rose." There is a touch of religious recognition in all his love of nature, which to me seems more truly pious than the proud flights and profound thoughts in the seven hundred and forty-four letters of St Bernard, and all his sharp and acute, and rather glorious sermons too. To me it always seemed irreverent in that great man that he boasted that he only eat his dinner, but never tasted it, as if his mouth were a mill and no more; it was certainly a fling at the good God, though the saint meant it otherwise. That great soul which made an ox's crib at Bethlehem holy ground, and the central point of many a pilgrimage, never flouted at God's world in that sort. He saw a lesson in the flight of the raven; in the savourless salt there was a sermon; there is a beatitude in the dry grass of the baking-kettle of a poor woman in the company going up