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.

We have not the innocence of Eden; but by God's help and Christ's example we may have the victory of Gethsemane.

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.

Setting is preliminary to brighter rising; decay is a process of advancement; death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.

Not in achievement, but in endurance, of the human soul, does it show its divine grandeur and its alliance with the infinite.

When I contrast the loving Jesus, comprehending all things in his ample and tender charity, with those who profess to bear his name, marking their zeal by what they do not love, it seems to me as though men, like the witches of old, had read the Bible backward, and had taken incantations out of it for evil, rather than inspiration for good.

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.