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
out of its sight, strangling him to death, that mother forgets not her
child. She had his earliest kiss from lips all innocent of coming ill,
and she will have his last. Yes, she will press his cold and stiffened
form to her own bosom; the bosom that bore and fed the innocent babe
yearns yet with mortal longing for the murdered murderer. Infamous to
the world, his very dust is sacred dust to her. She braves the world's
reproach, buries her son, piously hoping, that as their lives once
mingled, so their ashes shall. The world, cruel and forgetful oft,
honors the mother in its deepest heart. Do you tell me that culprit's
mother loves her son more than God can love him? Then go and worship
her. I know that when father and mother both forsake me, in the
extremity of my sin, I know my God loves on. Oh yes, ye sons of men,
Indian and Greek, ye are right to trust your God. Do priests and their
churches say No!--bid them go and be silent forever. No grain of dust
gets lost from off this dusty globe; and shall God lose a man from off
this sphere of souls? Believe it not.
I know that suffering follows sin, lasting long as the sin. I thank God
it is so; that God's own angel stands there to warn back the erring
Balaams, wandering towards woe. But God, who sends the rain, the dew,
the sun, on me as on a better man, will, at last, I doubt it not, make
us all pure, all just, all good, and so, at last, all happy. This
follows from the nature of God himself, for the All-good must wish the
welfare of His child; the All-wise know how to achieve that welfare; the
All-powerful bring it to pass. Tell me He wishes not the eternal welfare
of all men, then I say, That is not the God of the universe. I own not
that as God. Nay, I tell you it is not God you speak of, but some
heathen fancy, smoking up from your unhuman heart. I would ask the worst
of mothers, Did you forsake your child because he went astray, and
mocked your word? "Oh no," she says; "he was but a child, he knew no
better, and I led him right, corrected him for his good, not mine!" Are
we not all children before God; the wisest, oldest, wickedest, God's
child! I am sure He will never forsake me, how wicked soever I become. I
know that he is love; love, too, that never fails. I expect to suffer
for each conscious, wilful wrong; I wish, I hope, I long to suffer for
it. I am wronged if I do not; what I do not outgrow, live over and
forget here, I hope to expiate there. I fear a sin; not to outgrow a
sin.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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