Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 2 (of 3)Parker, Theodore
Religion
Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 2 (of 3)
Parker, Theodore
Sermons, American; Unitarianism
Last Sunday I said something of the moral condition of Boston; to-day I
ask your attention to a Sermon of the Spiritual Condition of Boston. I
use the word spiritual in its narrower sense, and speak of the condition
of this town in respect to piety. A little while since, in a sermon of
piety, I tried to show that love of God lay at the foundation of all
manly excellence, and was the condition of all noble, manly development;
that love of truth, love of justice, love of love, were respectively the
condition of intellectual, moral, and affectional development, and that
they were also respectively the intellectual, moral, and affectional
forms of piety; that the love of God as the Infinite Father, the
totality of truth, justice, and love was the general condition of the
total development of man's spiritual powers. But I showed, that
sometimes this piety, intellectual, moral, affectional or total, did not
arrive at self-consciousness; the man only unconsciously loving the
Infinite in one or all these modes, and in such cases the man was a
loser by frustrating his piety, and allowing it to stop in the truncated
form of unconsciousness.
Now what is in you will appear out of you; if piety be there in any of
these forms, in either mode, it will come out; if not there, its fruits
cannot appear. You may reason forward or backward: if you know piety
exists, you may foretell its appearance; if you find fruits thereof, you
may reason back and be sure of its existence. Piety is love of God as
God, and as we only love what we are like, and in that degree, so it is
also a likeness to God. Now it is a general doctrine in Christendom that
divinity must manifest itself; and, in assuming the highest form of
manifestation known to us, divinity becomes humanity. However, that
doctrine is commonly taught in the specific and not generic form, and is
enforced by an historical and concrete example, but not by way of a
universal thesis. It appears thus: The Christ was God; as such He must
manifest himself; the form of manifestation was that of a complete and
perfect man. I reject the concrete example, but accept the universal
doctrine on which the special dogma of the Trinity is erected. From that
I deduce this as a general rule: If you follow the law of your nature,
and are simple and true to that, as much of godhead as there is in you,
so much of manhood will come out of you, and, as much of manhood comes
out of you, so much of godhead was there within you; as much subjective
divinity, so much objective humanity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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