Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/123

 Tuesday will be the seventy-eighth anniversary of American Independence. The day suggests a national subject as theme for meditation this morning. The condition of America makes it a dark and a sad meditation. I ask your attention, therefore, to a "Sermon of the Dangers which threaten the Rights of Man in America."

The human race is permanent as the Mississippi, and like that is fed from springs which never dry; but the several nations are as fleeting as its waves. In the great tide of humanity, States come up, one after the other, a wave or a bubble; each lasts its moment, then dies—passed off, forgot:

while the great stream of humanity rolls ever forward, from time to eternity:—not a wave needless; not a snow flake, no drop of rain or dew, no ephemeral bubble, but has its function to perform in that vast, unmeasured, never-ending stream. How powerless appears a single man! He is one of a thousand million men; the infinitesimal of a vulgar fraction; one leaf on a particular tree in the forest. A single nation, like America, is a considerable part of mankind now living; but when compared with the human race of all time, past and to come, it seems as nothing; it is but one