is nothing in it! try what it is to speak with God behind you,—to speak so as to be only the arrow in the bow which the Almighty draws.”
"With what affectionate tenderness does this great, faithful soul pour out his love to his own church! He invites men to the communion-service.
“Christian brethren, in heaven you are known by the name of Christ. On earth, for convenience’s sake, you are known by the name of Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists, and the like. Let me speak the language of heaven, and call you simply Christians. Whoever of you has known the name of Christ, and feels Christ’s life beating within him, is invited to remain and sit with us at the table of the Lord.”
And again, when a hundred were added to his church, he says:—
“My friends, my heart is large to-day. I am like a tree upon which rains have fallen till every leaf is covered with drops of dew; and no wind goes through the boughs hut I hear the pattering of some thought of joy and gratitude. I love you all more than ever before. You are crystalline to me; your faces are radiant; and I look through your eyes, as through windows, into heaven. I behold in each of yon an imprisoned angel, that is yet to burst, forth, and to live and shine in the better sphere.”
He has admirable power of making a popular statement of his opinions. He does not analyze a matter to its last elements, put the ultimate facts in a row and find out their causes or their law of action, nor aim at large synthesis of generalization, the highest effort of philosophy, which groups things into a whole;—it is commonly thought both of these processes are out of place in meeting-houses and lecture-halls,—that the people can comprehend neither the one nor the other;—but he gives a popular view of the thing to be discussed, which can be understood on the spot without painful reflection. He speaks for the ear which takes in at once and understands. He never makes attention painful. He illustrates his subject from daily life; the fields, the streets, stars, flowers, music, and babies are his favorite emblems. He remembers that he does not speak to scholars, to minds disciplined by long habits of thought, but to men with common education, carelul and troubled about many things; and they keep his words and ponder them in their hearts. So he has the diffuseness of a wide natural field, which properly spreads out its clover, dandelions, dock, buttercups, grasses, violets, with here and there a delicate Arethusa that seems to have run under this sea of common vegetation and come up in a strange place. He has not the artificial condensation of a garden, where luxuriant Nature assumes the form of Art. His dramatic power makes his sermon also a life in the pulpit; his auditorium is also a theatrum, for he acts to the eye what he addresses to the ear, and at once wisdom enters at the two gates. The extracts show his power of thought and speech as well as of feeling. Here are specimens of that peculiar humor which appears in all his works.
“Sects and Christians that desire to be known by the undue prominence of some single feature of Christianity are necessarily imperfect just in proportion to the distinctness of their peculiarities. The power of Christian truth is in its unity and symmetry, and not in the saliency or brilliancy of any of its special doctrines. If among painters of the human face and form there should spring up a sect of the eyes, and another sect of the nose, a sect of the hand, and a sect of the foot, and all of them should agree but In the one thing of forgetting that there was a living spirit behind the features more important than them, all, they would too much resemble the schools and cliques of Christians; for the spirit of Christ is the great essential truth; doctrines are but the features of the face, and ordinances but the hands and feet.”
Here are some separate maxims:—
“It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim-milk.”
“The mother’s heart is the child's schoolroom.”
“They are not reformers who simply abhor evil. Such men become in the end abhorrent themselves.”
“There are many troubles which you can’t cure by the Bible and the Hymn-book, but which you can cure by a good perspiration and a breath of fresh air.”
