Man was sent into the world to be a growing and exhaustless force. The world was spread out around him to be seized and conquered. Realms of infinite truth burst open above him, inviting him to tread those shining coasts along which Newton dropped his plummet, and Herschel sailed,--a Columbus of the skies.

Under the shadow of earthly disappointment, all unconscious to ourselves, our Divine Redeemer is walking by our side.

Labor, with its coarse raiment and its bare right arm, has gone forth in the earth, achieving the truest conquests and rearing the most durable monuments. It has opened the domain of matter and the empire of the mind. The wild beast has fled before it, and the wilderness has fallen back.... its triumphal march is the progress of civilization.

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?

To me there is something thrilling and exalting in the thought that we are drifting forward into a splendid mystery-into something that no mortal eye hath yet seen, and no intelligence has yet declared.

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.

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.