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

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.

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.

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."

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