Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/177

164 nearest are gone; but the Infinite Mother folds me to heir bosom, and her tenderness wipes the tears from my eyes; fall asleep in the Infinite arms, remembering that no harm has happened to those who are taken, and there is a place in store for the one that is left. I know that no evils are absolute and lasting; nay, before the creation of the world, all the errors, the mistakes, and the sins which you, or I, or the human race, would commit, were foreseen by the Infinite Father, were provided for long before they came to pass, and shall, all of them, be rounded off at last into a whole of infinite bliss, infinite love towards each child that He has created, towards Cain, towards Iscariot, the kidnapper, and the victims of a world of cruelty and wrong.

I can look on the world's suffering and sorrow, on the wars and slavery, the poverty, drunkenness, and crime, the dreadful want which pines in cities, the vice we pile up in jails to perish in malignant rot, the more vicious vice which builds those jails; I can look on all the sad heartbreak of mankind, and I know it will be all overruled by the Creator in His machinery of the world so that infinite good shall come at last. Of all the world's suffering and transgression, none came by superhuman chance, and so is a world accident; none by superhuman malignity, and is a world curse. The history of man is the calculated consequence of the faculties God put in man, known before-hand to the Infinite Cause, provided by the Infinite Providence, and made to serve His purpose of eternal love. Then there comes the rising up of all my spirit in one great act of gratitude, reverence, and trust, one great feeling of love to God, and this fills me with unbounded delight. Passive to receive God's love, I am active to return it with love again. I just now spoke of the delight of being loved by mortal men! and then of the intimate joy of conscious love received from God! But as our highest joy is of action, and not merely of receiving, as it is more blessed to give affection than to receive even that, so the joy which a man feels from his conscious love of the Infinite God far surpasses even the delight which he has from being loved by the Father.

My affection for my earthly friends is checked by the