Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/246

Rh and all his world within rejoicing arms. Nothing is so socializing as piety: my Father and my Mother, they are also yours.

No man is complete without the culture of the religious element; no high faculty perfect without help from that. I see great naturalists without it, great politicians, great artists; not great men. Nay, their special science, politics, art, is less philosophic, statesmanlike, aesthetic, for lack of this wholeness and thorough health within the man's interior. The notes of music, ground out on a hand-organ in the street, tell me if their composer had ever listened to the quiring of these birds of paradise.

There is a story—perhaps some of you never heard it,—that out of Parian stone a great Christian artist in the dark ages, once carved a statue of the Virgin Mary—their church's ideal woman. It was transcendent of mortality, angelic, disdainful of earth, fit only for the devotional delights of heaven, not womanly duty on earth, and sympathy with suffering and sinful men. He wrought so fair that Phidias and Praxiteles and many a heathen more who knew the wondrous art to transfigure marble into life, through their open graves came back from heaven to look thereon; and filled with joy at this new type of womanhood, so different from the Aphrodites and Athenas, so free alike from sensual taint and oligarchic pride of intellect and power, with their cold, dumb, visionary mouths, they kissed the plastic hand which wrought the wondrous work. But Mary herself — no queenly virgin transcending earth, but peasant Joseph's honest wife and natural mother of his boy—came also back from her heavenly transfiguration. Well pleased she looked thereon, but was not quite content, loving the natural woman of humanity, a carpenter's wife and mother to boys and girls in Nazareth, more than she loved a non-human, transcendental virgin of the church's creed, fit only for heavenly joy; and so she put a live branch of Hebrew lilies, sweet as these New England violets, wet with dew, into the statue's folded hand. Fair were they as the marble, but living flowers, which grew out of the hard black ground, and bore their seed within them, to fill the earth with future loveliness. And this piece of actual nature, surpassing the sculptor's art, so criticised his dreamy stone, that when he woke and saw it