Character has more effect than anything else. Let a number of loud-talking men take up a particular question, and one man of character, of known integrity and beauty of soul, will outweigh them all in his influence.
God's work is freedom. Freedom is dear to his heart. He wishes to make man's will free, and at the same time wishes it to be pure, majestic, and holy.
A day! It has risen upon us from the great deep of eternity, girt round with wonder; emerging from the womb of darkness; a new creation of life and light spoken into being by the word of God.
There is no tariff so injurious as that with which sectarian bigotry guards its commodities. It dwarfs the soul by shutting out truths from other continents of thought, and checks the circulation of its own.
Munificent nature follows the methods of the divine and true, and rounds all things to her perfect law. While nations are convulsed with blood and violence, how quietly the grass grows.
Down below all the crust of human conceptions, of human ideas, Christ sank an artesian well into a source of happiness so pure and blessed that even yet the world does not believe in it.
Can you conceive of anything that so represents the glory, and truth, and marvelousness of God's nature as the idea of peace?
The night comes for the purpose of checking our busy employment, and introducing an interval of repose between the links of our action and our aspiration. It draws its dim curtain around the field of toil. It buries the objects of our handiwork in darkness, and involves them with uncertainty. It comes to the relief of the exhausted body and the tired brain. Our powers, harmonizing with the diurnal revolutions of the earth, fail with the failing light, and a merciful Providence casts around us this mantle of shadow, and snatches us from our occupation.
No great truth bursts upon man without having its hemisphere of darkness and sorrow.
Truth is poetry; it is the grandest poetry.
The excellence and inspiration of truth is in the pursuit, not in the mere having of it. The pursuit of all truth is a kind of gymnastics; a man swings from one truth with higher strength to gain another. The continual glory is the possibility opening before us.
A man that simply loads himself down with possessions of which he has no actual need, when he dies slips out of them--as a little insect might slip out of some parasite shell into which it has ensconced itself--into the grave, and is forgotten.
Nature satisfies my thirst; it feeds my hunger; it finds me clothing; it affords me shelter; it wraps me around when I sleep with beneficent and watchful care; and it takes me at last to its great bosom, where my ashes mingle with their kindred dust.
If angels stoop from visions of more than earthly beauty to spells of less than earthly worth, they are but fallen angels, mingling divine utterances with the babblings of madness, and the madness is not the divineness.
Humility is not a weak and timid quality; it must be carefully distinguished from a groveling spirit.
The weak sinews become strong by their conflict with difficulties.
Our life is what we make it. An insignificant game or a noble trial; a dream or a reality; a play of the senses worn out in selfish use, and flying "swifter than a weaver's shuttle," or an ascension of the soul, by daily duties and unfaltering faith, to more spiritual relations and to loftier toils.
God's beneficence streams out from the morning sun, and his love looks down upon us from the starry eyes of midnight. It is his solicitude that wraps us in the air, and the pressure of his hand, so to speak, that keeps our pulses beating. O! it is a great thing to realize that the Divine Power is always working; that nature, in every valve and every artery, is full of the presence of God.
Truth is new, as well as old. It has new forms; and where you may find a new statement, an earnest statement, you may conclude that by the law of progress it is more likely to be a correct statement than that which has been repeated for ages by the lips of tradition.
The individual and the race are always moving, and as we drift into new latitudes new lights open in the heaven more immediately over us.
A thousand wheels of labor are turned by dear affections, and kept in motion by self-sacrificing endurance; and the crowds that pour forth in the morning and return at night are daily procession of love and duty.
All natural results are spontaneous. The diamond sparkles without effort, and the flowers open impulsively beneath the summer rain. And true religion is a spontaneous thing,--as natural as it is to weep, to love, or to rejoice.
Pure felicity is reserved for the heavenly life; it grows not in an earthly soil.
There is a sweet anguish springing up in our bosoms when a child's face brightens under the shadow of the waiting angel. There is an autumnal fitness when age gives up the ghost; and when the saint dies there is a tearful victory.
Swift calls discretion low prudence; it is high prudence, and one of the most important elements entering into either social or political life.
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