If you do anything above party, the true hearted ones of all parties sympathize with you.
Pray over every truth; for though the renewed heart is not “desperately wicked,” it is quite deceitful enough to become so, if God be forgotten a moment.
Look at the bow in the cloud, in the very rain itself. That is a sign that the sun, though you cannot see it, is shining still – that up above beyond the cloud is still sunlight and warmth and cloudless blue sky.
There will be no true freedom without virtue, no true science without religion, no true industry without the fear of God and love to your fellow citizens.
All the butterflies and cockyolybirds would fly past me.
There are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream.
Music is a sacred, a divine, a God-like thing, and was given to man by Christ to lift our hearts up to God, and make us feel something of the glory and beauty of God, and of all which God has made.
Love can make us fiends as well as angels.
Because I believe in a God of absolute and unbounded love, therefore I believe in a loving anger of His which will and must devour and destroy all which is decayed, monstrous, abortive in His universe till all enemies shall be put under His feet, and God shall be all in all.
If thou art fighting against thy sins, so is God. On thy side is God who made all, and Christ who died for all and the Spirit who alone gives wisdom, purity, and nobleness.
Duty – the command of heaven, the eldest voice of God.
I am not aware that payment, or even favors, however gracious, bind any man’s soul and conscience in questions of highest morality and highest importance.
Wherever is love and loyalty, great purposes and lofty souls, even though in a hovel or a mine, there is fairyland.
Do you think that a man is renewed by God’s Spirit, when except for a few religious phrases, and a little more outside respectability, he is just the old man, the same character at heart he ever was?
In the four hundred and thirteenth year of the Christian era, some three hundred miles above Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was sitting on the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with drifting sand.
All who have travelled through the delicious scenery of North Devon must needs know the little white town of Bideford, which slopes upwards from its broad tide-river paved with yellow sands, and many-arched old bridge, where salmon wait for Autumn floods, toward the pleasant upland on the west.
We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things – the teacher of all truth.
Gradually the sunken land begins to rise again, and falls perhaps again, and rises again after that, more and more gently each time, till as it were the panting earth, worn out with the fierce passions of her fiery youth, has sobbed herself to sleep once more, and this new world of man is made.
Every winter, When the great sun has turned his face away, The earth goes down into a vale of grief, And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables, Leaving her wedding-garlands to decay- Then leaps in spring to his returning kisses.
I hope that my children, at least, if not I myself, will see the day when ignorance of the primary laws and facts of science will be looked upon as a defect only second to ignorance of the primary laws of religion and morality.