Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/116

112 misfortune, equatorial prosperity. To the eye of man, very little lofty manhood ever comes from the frozen ring wherein are hedged the beggar and the thief, where

And little comes also from the tropic zone of excessive affluence. I say it is so to the mind of man; but the mind of God takes in alike the circumstances of both, and allows for such as perish on hills of gold, or hills of snow, and doubtless has a compensation somewhere for all that is anywhere suffered by success or by disappointment.

It is a very wise prayer, in the Book of Proverbs—suiting either latitude—“Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me; lest I be full, and deny Thee, and say, Who is the Lord? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain.”

It seems comparatively easy to understand the peril of want, of distress, of cold and hunger. Yet it is difficult, adequately, to appreciate all these—the squalidness of want, the misery of human life, when reduced to its lowest terms of physical misfortune and material barrenness. But that is far easier than to calculate the effects of continual success. Prosperity is not a good schoolmaster to produce the higher forms of character. For that life must be discipline even more than it is delight. Give a man all that he asks for, and he ruins himself. So under God's providence we are often thwarted and checked by the material and the human world, while we learn the use and beauty of both. Contrary to the wishes of the town and the family, some angel is always troubling the water, that impotent folk may be healed thereby. If continually successful, we grow rash, heedless, vain-glorious, and overconfident. It is stormy seas which breed good sailors, who in stout ships outride the tempest. What a sad world it would be if there were no winter, never a storm! Man would be a mere butterfly, and no more. Adam was turned out of Eden, says the Hebrew mythology, and the Christians mourn thereat. It was his first step