Fiction is most powerful when it contains most truth; and there is little truth we get so true as that which we find in fiction.

The moment we recognize God as supreme in power and infinitely good and loving toward all His intelligent creatures, that moment we admit the doctrine of universal and special providence.

No man ever feels the restraint of law so long as he remains within the sphere of his liberty -- a sphere, by the way, always large enough for the full exercise of his powers and the supply of all his legitimate wants.

The hammer and the anvil are the two hemispheres of every true reformer's character.

Poet, forger of ideals, dreamer among the possibilities of life, prophet of the millenium, do you get impatient with the prosaic life around you -- the dulness, and the earthliness, and the brutishness of men? Fret not. Go forward into the realm which stretches before you; climb the highest mountain you can reach, and plant a cross there. The nations will come up to it some day. Work for immortality if you will; then wait for it. If your own age fail to recognize you, a coming age will not.

The fact is that sin is the most unmanly thing in God's world. You never were made for sin and selfishness. You were made for love and obedience.

Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility, and the young should not only shun it, but by the most thorough culture relieve themselves from all temptation to indulge in it. It is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are country neighborhoods in which it rages like a pest. Churches are split in pieces by it. Neighbors are made enemies by it for life. In many persons it degenerates into a chronic disease, which is practically incurable. Let the young cure it while they may.