Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/179

Rh scholastic and mystic both, still speaking to the mind of men, or in poetic legends insinuated truth; which built that heroic architecture, overmastering therewith the sense and soul of man:—

But the piety winch I find now, in this age, here in our own land, I respect, honour, and admire yet more; I find it in the form of moral life ; that is the piety I love, piety in her own loveliness. Would I could find poetic strains as fit to sing of her—but yet such

Let me do no dishonour to other days, to Hebrew or to Grecian saints. Unlike and hostile though they were, they jointly fed my soul in earliest days. I would not underrate the mediaeval saints, whose words and works have been my study in a manlier age; yet I love best the fair and vigorous piety of our own day. It is beautiful, amid the strong, rank life of the nineteenth century, amid the steam-mills and the telegraphs which talk by lightning, amid the far-reaching enterprises of our time, and amid the fierce democracies, it is beautiful to find this fragrant piety growing up in unwonted forms, in places where men say no seed of heaven can lodge and germinate. So in a June meadow, when a boy, and looking for the cranberries of another year, faded and tasteless, amid the pale but coarse rank grass, and discontented that I found them not, so I have seen the crimson arethusa or the cymbidium shedding an unexpected loveliness o'er all the watery soil, and all the pale and coarse rank grass, a prophecy of summer near at hand. So in October, when the fields are brown with frost, the blue and fringed gentian meets your eye, filling with thankful tears.

There is no decline of piety, but an increase of it; a good deal has been done in two hundred years, in one hundred years,—yes, in fifty years. Let us admit, with thankfulness of his art, that piety is in greater proportion to