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

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

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.

The ground of all religion, that which makes it possible, is the relation in which the human soul stands to God.

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

Not as men of science , not as critics , not as philosophers , but as little children , shall we enter into the kingdom of heaven .

Criticism is not religion, and by no process can it be substituted for it. It is not the critic's eye, but the child's heart, that most truly discerns the countenance that looks out from the pages of the gospel.