For with all our pretension to enlightenment, are we not now a talking, desultory, rather than a meditative generation?

We are not called on to believe this or that doctrine which may be proposed to us till we can do so from honest conviction. But we are called on to trust--to trust ourselves to God, being sure that He will lead us right--to keep close to Him--and to trust the promises which He whispers through our conscience; this we can do, and we ought to do.

Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimation of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness.

There is perhaps no truer sign that a man is really advancing than that he is learning to forget himself, that he is losing the natural thoughts about self in the thought of One higher than himself, to whose guidance he can commit himself and all men.

Beauty comes, we scarce know how, as an emanation from sources deeper than itself.

For with all our pretension to enlightenment, are we not now a talking, desultory, rather than a meditative generation?

The sense that a man is serving a Higher than himself, with a service which will become ever more and more perfect freedom, evokes more profound, more humbling, more exalted emotions than any thing else in the world can do. The spirit of man is an instrument which cannot give out its deepest, finest tones, except under the immediate hand of the Divine Harmonist.