Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom.

Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.

This is the eternal law of Nature for a man, my beneficent Exeter-Hall friends; this, that he shall be permitted, encouraged, and if need be, compelled to do what work the Maker of him has intended by the making of him for this world! Not that he should eat pumpkin with never such felicity in the West India Islands is, or can be, the blessedness of our Black friend; but that he should do useful work there, according as the gifts have been bestowed on him for that.

At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?

It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.

In the huge mass of evil as it rolls and swells, there is ever some good working toward deliverance and triumph.