My stern chase after time is, to borrow a simile from Tom Paine, like the race of a man with a wooden leg after a horse.

From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future.

I have made it a practice for several years to read the Bible through in the course of every year. I usually devote to this reading the first hour after I rise every morning. As, including the Apocrypha, it contains about fourteen hundred chapters, and as I meet with occasional interruptions, when this reading is for single days, and sometimes for weeks, or even months, suspended, my rule is to read five chapters every morning, which leaves an allowance of about one-forth of the time for such interruptions.

The influence of each human being on others in this life is a kind of immortality.

Is it not that in the chain of human events, the birthday of a nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior? That it forms a leading event in the progress of the Gospel dispensation? Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission upon earth? That it laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity?

Where annual elections end where slavery begins.

Civil liberty can be established on no foundation of human reason which will not at the same time demonstrate the right of religious freedom.