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
It must be a social state. Our nature is social; our joys social. For
our progress here, our happiness, we depend on one another. Must it not
be so there? It must be an advance upon our nature and condition here.
All the analogy of nature teaches that. Things advance from small to
great; from base to beautiful. The girl grows into a woman; the bud
swells into the blossom, that into the fruit. The process over, the work
begins anew. How much more must it be so in the other life. What old
powers we shall discover now buried in the flesh; what new powers shall
come upon us in that new state, no man can know; it were but poetic
idleness to talk of them. We see in some great man, what power of
intellect, imagination, justice, goodness, piety, he reveals, lying
latent in us all. How men bungle in their works of art! No Raphael can
paint a dew-drop or a flake of frost. Yet some rude man, tired with his
work, lies down beneath a tree, his head upon his swarthy arm, and sleep
shuts, one by one, these five scant portals of the soul, and what an
artist is he made at once! How brave a sky he paints above him, with
what golden garniture of clouds set off; what flowers and trees, what
men and women does he not create, and moving in celestial scenes! What
years of history does he condense in one short minute, and when he
wakes, shakes off the purple drapery of his dream as if it were but
worthless dust and girds him for his work anew! What other powers there
are shut up in men less known than this artistic phantasy; powers of
seeing the distant, recalling the past, predicting the future, feeling
at once the character of men--of this we know little, only by rare
glimpses at the unwonted side of things. But yet we know enough to guess
there are strange wonders there waiting to be revealed.
What form our conscious, social, and increased activity shall take, we
know not. We know of that no more than before our birth we knew of this
world, of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch, or the things which
they reveal. We are not born into that world, have not its senses yet.
This we know, that the same God, all-powerful, all-wise, all-good, rules
there and then, as here and now. Who cannot trust him to do right and
best for all? For my own part, I feel no wish to know how or where, or
what I shall be hereafter. I know it will be right for my truest
welfare; for the good of all. I am satisfied with this trust.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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