There have been men who could play delightful music on one string of the violin, but there never was a man who could produce the harmonies of heaven in his soul by a one-stringed virtue.

What a proof of the Divine tenderness is there in the human heart itself, which is the organ and receptacle oft so many sympathies! When we consider how exquisite are those conditions by which it is even made capable of so much suffering--the capabilities of a child's heart, of a mother's heart,--what must be the nature of Him who fashioned its depths, and strung its chords.

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.

Christianity has made martyrdom sublime, and sorrow triumphant.

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.

It is because we underrate thought, because we do not see what a great element it is in religious life, that there is so little of practical and consistent religion among us.

All evil, in fact the very existence of evil, is inexplicable until we refer to the paternity of God. It hangs a huge blot in the universe until the orb of divine love rises behind it. In that apposition we detect its meaning. It appears to us but a finite shadow as it passes across the disk of infinite light.