Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/286

Rh ambitious Jesuit could better form a sect, any harlequin of the pulpit, who knew how to lay his hand on the religious instincts of men, could sooner draw a crowd. I have worked for a long time, in a long time. I have aimed to help men and women become what God meant we should be—noble men and women, whose prayer is the communion of their soul with God's soul, whose life is a daily service of Him, by the normal discipline, development, use, and enjoyment of every limb of the body, and every faculty of the spirit. Do I help you to this? If not, then leave me, let these handsome walls be silent, empty, desorted, lone, till some nobler one shall come who shall waken religion in your consciousness, as that great master [pointing to the statue of Beethoven] out of the common! air produced such music as enchants the world. Go you elsewhere, and find you bread from heaven in whatever desert it be rained down, and fill you with living water, no matter from what rock it flows forth, nor whose hand smites open the fountain's blessed way!

But if I so instruct your mind that it fills itself with A truth and beauty, if I do rouse your conscience till it see the higher law of God's unchanging right, and if I do confirm your will till that law becomes your daily guide to life, if I do touch your affections till you better love each other—the young man more purely the maiden, and she him with purer answering love, till wife and husband, parent and child, kinsfolk, friend, and acquaintance, are knit in more welcome ties, till a larger patriotism warm you with concern for the poor, the maimed, the outcast, the slave, the drunkard, the harlot, the thief, the murderer, till a larger philanthropy join you to all mankind—and if I stir the feelings infinite till your souls are informed with the living God and have an absolute trust in Him—if I help you to these grand ideas of God, of man, of the relation between them, of duty here, and right to heaven hereafter—then am I blessed in you, and you also are blessed in me, and after the years of strife shall have passed by, you and I, though all forgot, our very names perished, shall yet be a power in the nation to soothe, and heal, and bless, long after our immortal part shall have gone to those joys which the eye hath not seen, nor the I ear heard, nor the heart of man begun to comprehend.