Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/174

Rh is what womanhood is compared with girlhood or babyhood. I say this from my own experience; but it is not my experience alone,—every deep-hearted saint who rejoiced in the world of matter and the world of man, and then took fast hold on the world of God, tells us the same thing. What brave words have come to us from Jesus of Nazareth, from Paul of Tarsus, from Thomas & Kempis, and William Law, and Isaac Watts, and that great stout-hearted man whose foot was so deep in the world of matter, whose hands went so largely into the world of men, and whose soul took hold so strongly on the world of God—Martin Luther: what brave words these have left us of their experience in the world of God. Nay, how full of the deepest and richest experience* of this kind were the lives of the saints of the Quaker church! What joy had Fox, and Nayler, and Penn, and Woolman, and Scott, and all those pious souls—women and men, who learned to lie low in the hand of God, and rejoice in their consciousness of Him and the visitations of the Eternal Love!

What exquisite delights they are which make up our experience and enjoyment of God. The aspect of beauty, in every form, is always a joy—in the shape and colour of a blade of grass, a nut, a fly's wing, a pearl found in a mussel of a New Hampshire brook. What higher delight is there in the beauty of the human form! Beauty is made up of these four things—completeness as a whole, perfection of the parts, fitness of each part for its function, and correspondence with the faculties of man. These four things make up the statics and dynamics of beauty. Now, looked at with the intellectual and aesthetic part of human consciousness, God is absolute beauty. He is the beauty of being, self-existence; the beauty of power, almightiness; of intellect, all-knowingness; of conscience, all-righteousness; of affection, all-lovingness; of the soul, all-holiness; in a word, He is the absolute, the altogether beautiful. As men take delight in mere sensuous loveliness of beautiful things, a rose, a lily, a dewdrop, a sunset, a statue or a star, or man's or woman's handsome face, all heedless of their use; so a contemplative man may take rapturous joy in the absolute beauty of God—infinitely attractive to every spiritual faculty of man—having that fourfold loveli-