As for environments, the kingliest being ever born in the flesh lay in a manger.
For soon, very soon do men forget Their friends upon whom Death’s seal is set.
The deepest life of nature is silent and obscure; so often the elements that move and mould society are the results of the sister’s counsel and the mother’s prayer.
The wild bird that flies so lone and far has somewhere its nest and brood. A little fluttering heart of love impels its wings, and points its course. There is nothing so solitary as a solitary man.
It is the veiled angel of sorrow who plucks away one thing and another that bound us here in ease and security, and, in the vanishing of these dear objects, indicates the true home of our affections and our peace.
It is those who make the least display of their sorrow who mourn the deepest.
Public feeling now is apt to side with the persecuted, and our modern martyr is full as likely to be smothered with roses as with coals.
Truth is the root, but human sympathy is the flower of practical life.
The downright fanatic is nearer to the heart of things than the cool and slippery disputant.
Can you conceive of anything that so represents the glory, and truth, and marvelousness of God’s nature as the idea of peace?
The more we sympathize with excellence, the more we go out of self, the more we love, the broader and deeper is our personality.
In this world the inclination to do things is of more importance than the mere power.
Earth has scarcely an acre that does not remind us of actions that have long preceded our own, and its clustering tombstones loom up like reefs of the eternal shore, to show us where so many human barks have struck and gone down.
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.
I should not like to preach to a congregation who all believed as I believe. I would as lief preach to a basket of eggs in their smooth compactness and oval formality.
Influence is exerted by every human being from the hour of birth to that of death.
How much in this world is charged to chance or fortune, or veiled under a more devout name, and accorded to Providence; while, when we come to look honestly into affairs, we find it to be a debt of our own accumulation, and one which we must inevitably pay.
Genius is the accumulated wealth of our humanity – its most intense development concentrated at one point, and then with clearer expression and with mysterious power shot back to us across the galvanic lines of thought and feeling.
Life, whether in this world or any other, is the sum of our attainment, our experience, our character. The conditions are secondary. In what other world shall we be more surely than we are here?
Each thing lives according to its kind; the heart by love, the intellect by truth, the higher nature of man by intimate communion with God.
The true Church is not an institution to be kept apart from the world because the world “is common and unclean,” but a vital heart of truth and love, beating with the life of Jesus, and sending abroad its sanctifying pulsations until nothing shall be common and unclean.