Dear Friends all, A thousand Christmas pleasures and blessings to you -- good resolutions and bright hopes for the New Year! Amen. People who can't be witty exert themselves to be pious or affectionate.

Kisses honeyed by oblivion.

We are apt to think it the finest era of the world when America was beginning to be discovered, when a bold sailor, even if he were wrecked, might alight on a new kingdom.

Those old stories of visions and dreams guiding men have their truth; we are saved by making the future present to ourselves.

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.

In the first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.