Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/150



Sunday I said something of the moral condition of Boston; to-day I ask your attention to a " Sermon of the Spiritual Condition of. JJos,tqn." I use the word spiritual in its narrower sense, and speak of the condition "Sermon of Piety," I tried to show that love of God lay at the foundation of all manly excellence, and was the condition of all noble, manly development; what love of truth, love of justice, love of love, were respectively the condition of intellectual, moral, and affectional development, and that they were also respectively the intellectual, moral, and affectional forms of piety; that the love of God as the Infinite Father, the totality of truth, justice, and love, was the general condition of the total development of man's spiritual powers. But I snowed that sometimes this piety, intellectual, moral, affectional, or total, did not arrive at self-consciousness; the man only unconsciously loving the Infinite in one or all these modes, and in such cases the man was a loser by frustrating his piety, and allowing it to stop in the truncated form of unconsciousness.

Now what is in you will appear out of you; if piety be there in any of these forms, in either mode, it will come out; if not there, its fruits cannot appear. You may reason forward or backward; if you know piety exists, you of this town in respect to piety.