The church-bells of innumerable sects are all chime-bells to-day, ringing in sweet accordance throughout many lands, and awaking a great joy in the heart of our common humanity.

It is not death to have the body called back to the earth, and dissolved into its kindred elements, and mouldered to dust, and, it may be, turn to daisies, in the grave. But it is death to have the soul paralyzed, its inner life quenched, its faculties dissipated; that is death.

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.

Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge, and dares to forgive an injury.

The minister should preach as if he felt that although the congregation own the church, and have bought the pews, they have not bought him. His soul is worth no more than any other man's, but it is all he has, and he cannot be expected to sell it for a salary. The terms are by no means equal. If a parishioner does not like the preaching, he can go elsewhere and get another pew, but the preacher cannot get another soul.

A true man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.

Those old ages are like the landscape that shows best in purple distance, all verdant and smooth, and bathed in mellow light.