They who seek religion for culture's sake are aesthetic, not religious, and will never gain that grace which religion adds to culture, because they never can have the religion.

The main condition is that the spiritual ear should be open to overhear and patiently take in, and the will ready to obey that testimony which, I believe, God bears in every human heart, however dull, to those great truths which the Bible reveals. This, and not logic, is the way to grow in religious knowledge, to know that the truths of religion are not shadows, but deep realities.

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.

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

The belief in a Divine education, open to each man and to all men, takes up into itself all that is true in the end proposed by culture, supplements, and perfects it.

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.

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