Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/283

270 feet Cause and Perfect Providence, Father and Mother to you and me and all that are. No longer shall you dream that you are totally depraved, your nature hateful to God, you no lawful child of his, but mothered by the devil's dam, with no natural right to heaven, ruin your final fate. You shall account yourself the grandest work God has ever made, created from a perfect motive, the desire to bless, and for a perfect end, the highest welfare possible for you, and furnished with faculties which are a perfect means thereto. Then you shall not fear and crouch down, and skulk about the world like a rat in the daylight of a city street, ashamed of your nature, afraid of your instincts, emasculating your intellect, your affections, and your soul; but with upright walk shall you go about your daily life, knowing that you have duties to do, rights to enjoy, serving your God by the normal discipline, development, use, and enjoyment of every limb of the body, every faculty of the spirit, every power which you possess over matter and over man. What heed will you then take to do every manly duty for its own sake, making conscience supreme, and to bear any cross laid upon you which should be borne. If you mistake and overstep the natural law of right—as you will, especially in early life — mortified with shame you will turn back to the natural and better way. Religion will not be a regeneration, being born again, a change of nature, a cutting something native off or tying something foreign on; but a development of nature, what the blossom is to the bud, what growth to manhood or womanhood is to girl or boy. Conscious of immortality, living now the everlasting life, you will look forward to that future heaven, which instinct tells even the savage of, and which science demonstrates to enlightened and thoughtful man. You are sure of the Infinite God, you have a right to his providence, and you can trust Him in all that is to come. Fear of the devil and his noisy hell of absurd and wicked torment, you will leave to such as love the hideous thought, whom you would but cannot cure; and in its place the certainty of ultimate heaven will come to you as the sure gift of the Infinite Father, the Infinite Mother, who is Cause and Providence to all the world!

When such doctrines of God, man, and the relation between them, of man's duties, rights, and destination, are