Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/122

118 which adorns the heroic brows of Man. Harrow the land with revolution and civil war, and there spring up great crops of men. When it rains money, the world reaps no such harvest !

“How do you suppose I could injure my boy?” asked a mother of a friend; and the austere answer was, “Give him all he wants, and he is ruined.” Where the city shoots the offal of the streets, there mushrooms, toadstools, and puff-balls come up; every morning you find them, rank and worthless; but in the clefts of the Swiss mountains, on the edge of New Hampshire rocks, where the artist can hardly lay his pencil safe, there gleams the Alp-bloom, the mountain-gentian, the hare-bell—clean as daylight and fair as blue-eyed Lyra's topmost star.

The individual man finds the period of excessive prosperity one of great peril to his moral character. “What a bitter lot is yours and father's!” said a thoughtful boy once to his mother; “we are hard pushed all round. How many of my sisters have died already! Some one of us is always sick; and then our poor relations hang on us a heavy load. But our cold-hearted neighbours over the hill there, beyond the great tree, they have had no trouble since I was born. Surely it is a very unjust and wicked God to let things go on so badly.” The deep-souled mother cleared her eye with her apron, and took her boy in her bosom, and said, “If it be so, it is our neighbours who have most cause to complain, and not we. They have had nothing but prosperity; they are rich, and getting richer only too fast. They have no old grandmother to help on in life, no poor relations to cling to their skirts and draw them back, no one of them is ever sick, no near friend has died; but because they have no changes they fear not God. They are cold-hearted, they are worldly and irreligious. I often pity them, and have said so to your father. It is we that have had the best chance in this world. They will doubtless have their opportunity also in the next. My boy, there is a gain for all this loss that you speak of, for wicked thoughts and actions are the only bad things which no man can profit by.”

I sometimes see a man with whom all is prosperous.