Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/89

Rh of human tyranny, that would be a calamity which the nation would never recover from. No! then religion would die out, affection fall dead; conscience would perish, intellect give up the ghost, and be no more. No law higher than human will! No watchmaker can make a long pendulum vibrate so quick as a short. In this very body there is that law. I wake, and watch, and will: my private caprice turns my hand, now here, now there. But who controls my breath? Who bids this heart beat all day long, and all the night, sleep I, or wake? Whose subtle law holds together these particles of flesh, of blood, and bone, in marvellous vitality? Who gives this eye its power to see, and opens wide the portal of the ear? and who enchants, with most mysterious life, this wondrous commonwealth of dust I call myself? It is the same Hand whose law is “higher than the Blue Ridge,” an “eagle's flight above the Alleghanies.” Who rules the State, and, out of a few stragglers that fled here to New England for conscience' sake, built up this mighty, wealthy State? Was it Carver and Winthrop who did all this, Standish and Saltonstall? Was it the cunning craftiness of mightiest men that consciously, well knowing what they did, laid the foundations of our New England State and our New England Church? Why, the boys at school know better. It was the eternal God, whose higher law the Pilgrim and the Puritan essayed to keep, not knowing whereunto the thing would grow. Shall the fool say in his heart there is no God? He cannot make a hair grow on his head but by the eternal law of his Father in heaven. Will the politician say there is no law of God for States? Ask the sorrowing world: let Austria and Hungary make reply. Nay, ask the Southern States of America to show us their rapid increase in riches, in civilization; to show us their schools and their scholars, their literature, their science, and their art! No law of God for States! It is writ on the iron leaf of destiny, “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a curse to any people.” Let the wicked hand of the South join with the Northern wicked hand, iniquity shall not prosper. But the eye of the wicked shall fail; they shall not escape; their hope shall be as giving up the ghost; because their tongue and their doings are against the Lord, to provoke the eyes of His