Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/68

64 nature of man. The mind and conscience of the individuals who make up the society are the faculties by which these laws likewise are found out. These laws, constant modes of individual or social action, are the sole and exclusive basis of human establishments which help attain the end of individual and social life. What conforms to these natural rights is called right; what conforms not, is wrong. A mill-dam or a monument must conform to the statical laws of matter, or not serve the purpose it was meant for: a mill or a steam-engine must conform to the dynamical laws of matter, or it is also useless. So all the social establishments of mankind, designed to further the positive or negative functions of society, must conform to the laws of human nature, or they will fail to achieve the purposes of individual and social life.

As I come to individual self-consciousness, I give utterance to these natural laws, or my notion of them, in certain rules of conduct which I make for myself. I say, “This will I do, for it is right; that will I not do, for it is wrong.” These are my personal resolutions, personal statutes. I make them in my high act of prayer, and in my common life seek to conform thereto. When I rise higher, in another act of prayer which has a greater experience for its basis, and so represents more life, I shall revise the old rules of conduct, and make new ones that are better. The rules of conduct derive all their objective and real value from their conformity with the law of God writ in my nature; all their subjective and apparent value, from their conformity to my notions of the law of God. The only thing which makes it right, and an individual moral duty, for me to keep my resolutions, is, that they themselves are right, or I believe them so. Now, as I see they are wrong, or think I see it, I shall revise or change them for better. Accordingly, I revise them many times in my life: now by a gradual change, the process of peaceful development; now by a sudden change, under conviction of sin, in penitence for the past, and great concern of mind for the future, by the process of personal revolution. But these rules of conduct are always provisional—my ladder for climbing up to the purposes of individual life. I will throw them away as soon as I can get better. They are amenable subjectively to my notion