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

The brightest crowns that are worn in heaven have been tried, and smelted, and polished and glorified through the furnaces of tribulation.

It is exceedingly deleterious to withdraw the sanction of religion from amusement. If we feel that it is all injurious we should strip the earth of its flowers and blot out its pleasant sunshine.

Whatever you truly conceive of in the mind, is possible.

The gospel has but a forced alliance with war. Its doctrine of human brotherhood would ring strangely between the opposed ranks. The bellowing speech of cartoon and the baptism of blood mock its liturgies and sacraments. Its gentle beatitudes would hardly serve as mottoes for defiant banners, nor its list of graces as names for ships-of-the-line.

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.

Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts.