“O Thou Creating and Protecting Power, who art our Father, yea, our Mother not the less, we flee unto thee, and would lift up the psalm of our thanksgiving unto thee, and by our prayer seek to hold communion with thy spirit, and be strengthened for the cares and the duties and the delights of our mortal life… We desire to be deeply conscious of thy presence, which fills all time, which occupies all space. We would know thee as thou art, and in our souls feel continually thy residence with us and the abiding of thy spirit in our heart…
We thank thee for this wondrous and lovely world in which thou hast placed us. For the magnificent beauty of summer we thank thee, for the storied promise of the spring which has gone by, and the earnest of the harvest, whose weeks in their fulfilment bring daily new tokens of thy goodness and thine infinite love. We thank thee that thou waterest the earth with rain from thine own sweet heavens, rejoicing the cattle on a thousand hills, which thou also carest for, as for thy chosen ones, and ministerest life to every little moss amid the stones of a city, and feedest the mighty forests which clothe with verdure our hills. We thank thee that thou givest us grass for the cattle, and corn to strengthen the frame of man… We bless thee for the beautiful amid the homely, the sublime among things low, for the good amid evil things, and the eternal amid what is transient and daily passing from our eye.”
Theodore Parker (1810 – 1860), Unitarian minister, transcendentalist, abolitionist and social reformer, born on this day
Chorlton Unitarians 