It is quite certain that, if from childhood men were to begin to follow the first intimations of conscience, honestly to obey them and carry them out into act, the power of conscience would be so strengthened and improved within them, that it would soon become, what it evidently is intended to be, "a connecting principle between the creature and the Creator."

That image or rather that Person, so human, yet so entirely Divine, has a power to fill the imagination, to arrest the affections, to deepen and purify the conscience, which nothing else in the world has.

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

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.

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