This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if not in body. More solitude and earlier hours!

Bountiful as is the hand of Providence, its gifts are not so bestowed as to seduce us into indolence, but to rouse us to exertion.

The title of Christian is a reproach to us, if we estrange ourselves from Him after whom we are denominated. The name of Jesus is not to be to us like the Allah of the Mahometans, a talisman or an amulet to be worn on the arm, as an external badge merely and symbol of our profession, and to preserve us from evil by some mysterious and unintelligible potency; but is to be engraved deeply on the heart, there written by the finger of God himself in everlasting characters.

No man has a right to be idle. Where is it that in such a world as this, that health, and leisure, and affluence may not find some ignorance to instruct, some wrong to redress, some want to supply, some misery to alleviate?

Its guilt therefore in these cases, is not to be measure by its effects on the happiness of mankind; nor is it to be denominated true or false glory, accordingly as the ends to which it is directed are beneficial or mischievous, just or unjust objects of pursuit; but it is false, because it exalts that which ought to be abased, and criminal, because it encroaches on the prerogative of God.

I must secure more time for private devotions. I have been living far too public for me. The shortening of devotions starves the soul, it grows lean and faint. I have been keeping too late hours.

Servile, and base, and mercenary, is the notion of Christian practice among the bulk of nominal Christians. They give no more than they dare not with-hold; they abstain from nothing but what they must not practise.