A single seed of fact will produce in a season or two a harvest of calumnies; but sensible men will pay no attention to them.

Just laws are no restraint upon the freedom of the good, for the good man desires nothing which a just law will interfere with.

To tell men that they cannot help themselves is to fling them into recklessness and despair.

Sacrifice is the first element of religion, and resolves itself in theological language into the love of God.

Beautiful is old age—beautiful as the slow-dropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious summer. In the old man, Nature has fulfilled her work; she loads him with blessings; she fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to a grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we should not call it beautiful.

In everyday things the law of sacrifice takes the form of positive duty.

There are at bottom but two possible religions--that which rises in the moral nature of man, and which takes shape in moral commandments, and that which grows out of the observation of the material energies which operate in the external universe.