Three Thousand Selected Quotations from Brilliant Writers/M
MALICE.
We are strangers to Christian love, if we harbor malice or revenge in our hearts toward any of our fellow-creatures, whatever treatment we receive at their hands.
To be useful as a Christian, a man must keep himself free from all malign feelings, from all bitterness of resentment. Even righteous indignation must not drag Love from her throne. Over all the soul's passions Love must preside in serene majesty. The Christian worker must learn (and the sooner the better) if he has not already learned, that there is something better for a Christian than to plan revenge, and nurse resentment, and call down fire from heaven, even on those who show themselves base and unworthy.
Beware of that which becomes the slanderer's life, of magnifying every speck of evil and closing the eye to goodness, till at last men arrive at the state in which generous, universal love (which is heaven) becomes impossible, and a suspicious, universal hate takes possession of the heart, and that is hell.
There is no cure for ossification of the heart. Oh, that miserable state, when to the jaundiced eye all good transforms itself into evil, and the very instruments of health become the poison of disease.
MAN.
Man is the crowning of history and the realization of poetry, the free and living bond which unites all nature to that God who created it for Himself.
—F. Godet.
Let us not undervalue the dignity of human nature. Man, although fallen, still retains some traces of his primeval glory and excellence—broken columns of a celestial temple, magnificent, even in its ruins.
How poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful is man!
—Young.
The older I grow—and I now stand upon the brink of eternity—the more comes back to me that sentence in the Catechism which I learned when a child, and the fuller and deeper its meaning becomes, "What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy Him forever."
What a chimera is man! what a confused chaos! what a subject of contradiction! a professed judge of all things, and yet a feeble worm of the earth! the great depositary and guardian of truth, and yet a mere huddle of uncertainty! the glory and the scandal of the universe!
—Pascal.
Man has wants deeper than can be supplied by wealth or nature or domestic affections. His great relations are to his God and to eternity.
In that vast march, the van forgets the rear; the individual is lost; and yet the multitude is many individuals. He faints and falls and dies; man is forgotten; but still mankind move on, still worlds revolve, and the will of God is done in earth and heaven.
The Divine government of the world is like a stream that rolls under us; men are only as bubbles that rise on its surface; some are brighter and larger, and sparkle longer in the sun than others; but all must break; whilst the mighty current rolls on in its wonted majesty!
But if, indeed, there be a nobler life in us than in these strangely moving atoms; if, indeed, there is an eternal difference between the fire which inhabits them, and that which animates us,—it must be shown, by each of us in his appointed place, not merely in the patience, but in the activity of our hope, not merely by our desire, but our labor, for the time when the dust of the generations of men shall be confirmed for foundations of the gates of the city of God.
MANHOOD.
Power in its measure and degree is the measure of manhood.
Give us an age in which Christian manhood shall assert itself as the highest earthly thing and the noblest earthly estate. Give us an age that, instead of whining and groaning under the truth, shall rejoice in the truth. Give us an age which, lifted into identity with its highest possessions, shall be made by those possessions patient, pure, heroic, and honorable.
Obedience, submission, discipline, courage—these are among the characteristics which make a man.
The man, whom I call deserving the name, is one whose thoughts and exertions are for others rather than himself.
The finest fruit earth holds up to its Maker is a finished man.
—Humboldt.
A Christian is the gentlest of men; but then he is a man.
There is a great deal more correctness of thought respecting manhood in bodily things than in moral things. For men's ideas of manhood shape themselves as the tower and spire of cathedrals do, that stand broad at the bottom, but grow tapering as they rise, and end, far up, in the finest lines, and in an evanishing point. Where they touch the ground they are most, and where they reach to the heaven they are least.
I long to have the children feel that there is nothing in this world more attractive, more earnestly to be desired than manhood in Jesus Christ.
MANLINESS.
The manliness of Christian love, and the putting away from ourselves of all fear, because we are "perfected in love," is one of the highest lessons that the gospel teaches us, and one of the greatest things which the gospel gives us.
The conscience of every man recognizes courage as the foundation of manliness, and manliness as the perfection of human character.
In proportion as man gets back the spirit of manliness, which is self-sacrifice, affection, loyalty to an idea beyond himself, a God above himself, so far will he rise above circumstances, and wield them at his will.
"The work of men"—and what is that? Well, we may any of us know very quickly, on the condition of being wholly ready to do it. But many of us are for the most part thinking, not of what we are to do, but of what we are to get; and the best of us are sunk into the sin of Ananias, and it is a mortal one—we want to keep back part of the price; and we continually talk of taking up our cross, as if the only harm in a cross was the weight of it—as if it was only a thing to be carried, instead of to be—crucified upon. "They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh, with the affections and lusts."
MEDITATION.
Meditation is the soul's perspective glass, whereby, in her long remove, she discerneth God, as if He were nearer at hand.
Profound meditation in solitude and silence frequently exalts the mind above its natural tone, fires the imagination, and produces the most refined and sublime conceptions. The soul then tastes the purest and most refined delight, and almost loses the idea of existence in the intellectual pleasure it receives. The mind on every motion darts through space into eternity; and raised, in its free enjoyment of its powers by its own enthusiasm, strengthens itself in the habitude of contemplating the noblest subjects, and of adopting the most heroic pursuits.
It is not he that reads most, but he that meditates most on Divine truth, that will prove the choicest, wisest, strongest Christian.
For with all our pretension to enlightenment, are we not now a talking, desultory, rather than a meditative generation?
It is an excellent sign, that after the cares and labors of the day, you can return to your pious exercises and meditations with undiminished attention.
Night by night I will lie down and sleep in the thought of God, and in the thought, too, that my waking may be in the bosom of the Father; and some time it will be, so I trust.
Avoid all refined speculations; confine yourself to simple reflections, and recur to them frequently. Those who pass too rapidly from one truth to another feed their curiosity and restlessness; they even distract their intellect with too great a multiplicity of views. Give every truth time to send down deep root into the heart.
—Fenelon.
MEEKNESS.
Meekness is the grace which, from beneath God's footstool, lifts up a candid and confiding eye, accepting God's smile of Fatherly affection, and adoring those perfections which it cannot comprehend.
He was oppressed, and He was afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth: He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openeth not His mouth.
—Bible.
MEMORY.
What thousands and millions of recollections there must be in us! And every now and then one of them becomes known to us; and it shows us what spiritual depths are growing in us, what mines of memory.
The pure memories given
To help our joy on earth, when earth is past.
Shall help our joy in heaven.
'Tis the plague of devils to think on what they are.
Certainly it is one of the most blessed things about "the faith that is in Christ Jesus," that it makes a man remember his own sinfulness with penitence, not with pain—that it makes the memory of past transgressions full of solemn joy, because the memory of past transgressions but brings to mind the depth and rushing fullness of that river of love which has swept them all away as far as the east is from the west. Oh, my brother, you cannot forget your sins; but it lies within your own decision whether the remembrance shall be thankfulness and blessedness, or whether it shall be pain and loss forever.
My friend, picture to yourself this—a human spirit shut up with the companionship of its forgotten and dead transgressions! There is a resurrection of acts as well as of bodies. Think what it will be for a man to sit surrounded by that ghastly company, the ghosts of his own sins! and as each forgotten fault and buried badness comes, silent and sheeted, into that awful society, and sits itself down there, think of him greeting each with the question, "Thou too? What! are ye all here? Hast thou found me, mine enemy?" and from each bloodless, spectral lip there tolls out the answer, the knell of his life, "I have found thee, because thou hast sold thyself to work evil in the sight of the Lord."
MERCY.
Consider this,
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation; we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.
Who will not mercy unto others show,
How can he mercy ever hope to have?
God loves our mercy to one another; but not upon conditions at variance with sanctity to Him.
Kind hearts are here; yet would the tenderest one
Have limits to its mercy; God has none.
Mercy to him that shows it is the rule.
—Cowper.
Nothing humbles and breaks the heart of a sinner like mercy and love. Souls that converse much with sin and wrath, may be much terrified; but souls that converse much with grace and mercy, will be much humbled.
MERIT.
He who thinks to be justified by any strength or merit of his own, and not by faith, puts himself in the place of God.
Merit is a work for the sake of which Christ gives rewards. But no such work is to be found, for Christ gives by promise. Just as if a prince should say to me, "Come to me in my castle, and I will give you a hundred florins." I do a work, certainly, in going to the castle, but the gift is not given me as the reward of my work in going, but because the prince promised it to me.
MILLENNIUM.
Thus everywhere and always God's agents—small and great—are at work, unsettling the wrong, establishing the right, and carrying the links of Truth's golden chain around the world.
When, O crowned Jesus; when, O loving Saviour; when, O patient and just Judge—when wilt Thou come forth from Thy hiding, and change tears to smiles, and groans to joys? When shall that choral song burst forth, sweeping through the air, and circling about Thy throne, which shall proclaim the redemption of the world to the Lord God?
Wearily have the years passed, I know; wearily to the pale watcher on the hill who has been so long gazing for the daybreak; wearily to the anxious multitudes who have been waiting for his tidings below. Often has the cry gone up through the darkness, "Watcher, what of the night?" and often has the disappointing answer come, "It is night still; here the stars are clear above me, but they shine afar, and yonder the clouds lower heavily, and the sad night winds blow." But the time shall come, and perhaps sooner than we look for it, when the countenance of that pale watcher shall gather into intenser expectancy, and when the challenge shall be given, with the hopefulness of a nearer vision, "Watcher, what of the night?" and the answer will come, "The darkness is not so dense as it was; there are faint streaks on the horizon's verge; mist is in the valleys, but there is a radiance on the distant hill. It comes nearer—that promise of the day. The clouds roll rapidly away, and they are fringed with amber and gold. It, is, it is the blest sunlight that I feel around me—Morning! It is morning!"
The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together; for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.
—Bible.
MINISTERS.
Our high mission, our noble calling, is to build up souls, to perfect the Christian life, and to make manhood acceptable to God, and radiant in the sight of all men.
Your great employment is to bring the individual souls of men to Christ.
The minister is to be a live man, a real man, a true man, a simple man, great in his love, great in his life, great in his work, great in his simplicity, great in his gentleness.
I do not envy a clergyman's life as an easy life, nor do I envy the clergyman who makes it an easy life.
Be ashamed of nothing but sin.
—Methodist Discipline.
A true minister is a man whose manhood itself is a strong and influential argument with his people. He lives in such relations with God, and in such genuine sympathy with man, that it is a pleasure to be under the unconscious influence of such a mind.
It is not the way to convert a sinner to knock him down first and then reason with him.
Learn in Christ how possible it is to be strong and mild, to blend in fullest harmony the perfection of all that is noble, lofty, generous in the soldier's ardor of heroic devotion; and of all that is calm, still, compassionate, tender in the priest's waiting before God and mediation among men.
Thou must be true thyself,
If thou the truth wouldst teach;
Thy soul must overflow, if thou
Another's soul wouldst reach;
It needs an overflowing heart
To give the lips full speech.
Think truly, and thy thoughts
Shall the world's famine feed,
Speak truly, and each word of thine
Shall be a fruitful seed;
Live truly, and thy life shall be
A great and noble creed.
If you would lift me, you must be on higher ground.
Only a loving heart can effectually present a loving gospel; only one who himself loves sinners, and is willing to deny himself for their sakes, can faithfully and persuasively represent Him who loved and gave Himself for sinners.
—Sunday-School Times.
"He commanded that something should be given her to eat." Has any body's daughter or any body's son been raised from spiritual death in your congregation, or in your class recently? If so, give the revived soul something to eat.
The minister, who would be most like the Master, must go and, like Him, lay the warm, kindly hand on the leper, the diseased, the wretched. He must touch the blind eyes with something from himself. The tears must be in his own eyes over the dead who are to be raised to spiritual life, Jesus is our great exemplar.
That pastor effects the most in the end who comes into closest personal contact with his charge. No amount of organizing, no skill in creating machinery and manipulating "committees" is a substitute for this. Who feels the power of a tear in the eye of a committee?
I find on inquiring among successful pastors, successful in the sense of winning men to Christ in profession, that they depend largely on personal contact.
As preachers we are to promote Christian culture, by bringing the dead branches to the living Vine, that, grafted into it, without a rag of human righteousness between, the life of Him may enter them; and by keeping them, as far as teaching and example can do it, abiding in Him, that they may bring forth fruit.
Every discourse of a true minister has an influence for good or evil, and that for eternity. Every word tells for the everlasting rise or fall, weal or woe, life or death, of souls. In every sentence we touch chords that shall send their vibrations through the endless future; that shall peal in the thunder of a guilty conscience, or resound in the music of a purified spirit.
You want to be radiant, eloquent ministers, ministers of great influence and success. Do you want to sit on the Lord's right hand and on His left? Then give Him your heart, so that in humility, in gentleness, in unfailing sweetness, in patience under all circumstances, you shall be like Him.
He that would speak Divine things in a language which living men of to-day can comprehend, must keep up with the researches and discoveries of men who study nature, and put her words into the speech of the present.
One great want of the times is a commanding ministry—a ministry of a piety at once sober and earnest, and of mightiest moral power. Give us these men, "full of faith and of the Holy Ghost," who will proclaim old truths with new energy, not cumbering them with massive drapery nor hiding them beneath piles of rubbish. Give us these men! men of sound speech, who will preach the truth as it is in Jesus, not with faltering tongue and averted eye, as if the mind blushed at its own credulity—not distilling into it an essence so subtle and so speedily decomposed that a chemical analysis alone can detect the faint odor which tells it has been there—but who will preach it apostlewise, that is, "first of all," at once a principle shrined in the heart and a motive mighty in the life—the source of all morals, and the inspiration of all charity—the sanctifier of every relationship, and the sweetener of every toil. Give us these men! men of zeal untiring—whose hearts of constancy quail not although dull men sneer, and proud men scorn, and timid men blush, and cautious men deprecate, and wicked men revile.
Many young ministers are poor men, but that is no reason, gentlemen, why you should be poor ministers.
What is ministerial success? Crowded churches, full aisles, attentive congregations, the approval of the religious world, much impression produced? Elijah thought so; and when he discovered his mistake, and found out that the Carmel applause subsided into hideous stillness, his heart well-nigh broke with disappointment. Ministerial success lies in altered lives, and obedient, humble hearts, unseen worth recognized in the judgment-day.
Do not fear the alleged "current of opinion." It was thus that Edwards, Brainard, Dwight, and Payson, preached, and the noblest and most enduring things in New England were the result. If the sentiment of the time is against their way, so much the worse for the sentiment! Paul and Peter and John and James so "reproved and rebuked and exhorted, with all long-suffering and doctrine."
This is the ministry and its work—not to drill hearts and minds and consciences into right forms of thought and mental postures, but to guide to the living God who speaks.
We are to be neither book-worms nor male gossips, but Christian gentlemen, with a side towards mental culture, and a side to practical life. We are to learn how to talk to the people by being with the people, and we are to learn how to raise them up by raising ourselves. We are never to forget that ministry is service, not mastery. "Ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake."
There are passages of the Bible that are soiled forever by the touches of the hands of ministers who delight in the cheap jokes they have left behind them.
MIRACLES.
A miracle is a supernatural event, whose antecedent forces are beyond our finite vision, whose design is the display of almighty power for the accomplishment of almighty purposes, and whose immediate result, as regards man, is his recognition of God as the Supreme Ruler of all things, and of His will as the only supreme law.
The miracles of earth are the laws of heaven.
When I look to my guiltiness, I see that my salvation is one of our Saviour's greatest miracles, either in heaven or earth.
Once a single word of the Saviour suddenly calmed a furiously agitated sea; one look of Him at us, and of ours towards Him ought always to perform the same miracle within us.
It was a great thing to open the eyes of a blind man, but it is a greater thing to open the eyes of a blind soul. It was a great thing to bring a dead body back to life, but it is a greater miracle to bring a soul dead in sin back to life. My friends have you ever felt the touch of this Jesus? Oh! that we all might feel His touch, that we might look and be healed and live.
For when self-seeking turns to love,
Which knows not mine and thine.
The miracle again is wrought,
And water changed to wine.
MISSIONS.
Men may glorify the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man, but such beliefs will never send missionaries to face the malarial belt of Africa, or the cannibals of the South Pacific. Only such tremendous truths as gather around Sinai and Calvary—man's redemption, life and death, heaven and hell—can inspire to such undertakings.
Palestine was the West Point and Annapolis for the world. In that little country God was training up a people out of whom, when the fullness of the time should come, His gospel cadets should emerge, fitted by all the training of all their national history for going out among the heathen and proclaiming the unsearchable riches of Christ.
Evangelism is not merely a work of love. It is the sheer law of self-preservation. The heathenism which is creeping along the fences of society is scattering its seeds on both sides. As we love our neighbor, we must try to do him good; but if we love only ourselves and our homes, we must be at work to make the world better. If Christians do not make the world better, the world will surely make the church worse.
A man may make his way across the Atlantic in a skiff, for all I know; but if you are intending to cross the sea, take my advice, and secure passage in a first-class steamer, and you will be more likely to get there. So it is with these heathen millions. I do not know but some of them may drift, and we shall find them in the city of God. But I do know that by giving them the gospel, by building up and supporting among them a Christian church, we shall greatly multiply their chances for heaven.
Every impulse and stroke of missionary power on earth is from the heart of Christ. He sows, and there is a harvest. He touches nations, and there arises a brotherhood, not only civilized by His light, but sanctified by His love. The isles of the ocean wait for Him. He spreads His net and gathers of every kind, and lo! the burden of the sea is not only fishes, but fishermen, who go and gather and come again. If there are activity, free giving, ready going, a full treasury, able men who say, "Here am I, send me," it is because through all the organization Christ lives, and His personal Spirit works. There is no other possible spring for that enthusiasm.
The movement has indeed been slow, and not such as man would have expected; but it has been analogous to the great movements of God in His providence and in His works. So, if we may credit the geologists, has this earth reached its present state. So have moved on the great empires. So retribution follows crime. So rise the tides. So grows the tree with long intervals of repose and apparent death. So comes on the spring, with battling elements and frequent reverses, with snowbanks and violets, and, if we had no experience, we might be doubtful what the end would be. But we know that back of all this, beyond these fluctuations, away in the serene heavens, the sun is moving steadily on; that these very agitations of the elements and seeming reverses, are not only the sign, but the result of his approach, and that the full warmth and radiance of the summer noontide are sure to come. So, O Divine Redeemer, Sun of Righteousness, come Thou! So will He come. It may be through clouds and darkness and tempest; but the heaven where He is, is serene; He is "traveling in the greatness of His strength;" and as surely as the throne of God abides, we know He shall yet reach the height and splendor of the highest noon, and that the light of millennial glory shall yet flood the earth.
On the American Continent, what a wonderful amalgamation of races we have witnessed, how wonderfully they have been fused into that one American people!—type and earnest of a larger fusion which Christianity will yet accomplish, when, by its blessed power, all tribes and tongues and races shall become one holy family. The present popularity of beneficences promises well for the missionary cause in the future. Men's hearts are undergoing a process of enlargement. Their sympathies are taking a wider scope. The world is getting closer, smaller, quite a compact affair. The world for Christ will yet be realized.
MORALITY.
Morality rests upon a sense of obligation; and obligation has no meaning except as implying a Divine command, without which it would cease to be.
Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning,—an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
All systems of morality are fine. The gospel alone has exhibited a complete assemblage of the principles of morality, divested of all absurdity. It is not composed, like your creed, of a few common-place sentences put into bad verse. Do you wish to see that which is really sublime? Repeat the Lord's Prayer.
To give a man a full knowledge of true morality, I would send him to no other book than the New Testament.
MOTIVE.
It is not the motive, properly speaking, that determines the working of the will; but it is the will that imparts strength to the motive. As Coleridge says: "It is the man that makes the motive, and not the motive the man."
In the eye of that Supreme Being to whom our whole internal frame is uncovered, dispositions hold the place of actions.
—Blair.
In general, we do well to let an opponent's motives alone. We are seldom just to them. Our own motives on such occasions are often worse than those we assail.
MURMURING.
I have noticed this, that when a man is full of the Holy Ghost he is the very last man to be complaining of other people.
Nothing is easier than fault-finding. No talent, no self-denial, no brains, no character, is required to set up in the grumbling business. But those that are moved by a genuine desire to do good have little time for murmuring or complaint.
—Robert West.
Some people are never content with their lot, let what will happen. Clouds and darkness are over their heads, alike whether it rain or shine. To them every incident is an accident, and every accident a calamity.
From mad dogs and grumbling professors may we all be delivered, and may we never take the complaint from either of them.
MYSTERY.
Whoever believes in a God at all, believes in an infinite mystery; and if the existence of God is such an infinite mystery, we can very well expect and afford to have many of His ways mysterious to us.
There is no religion without mysteries. God Himself is the great secret of Nature.
Where is the subject that does not branch out into infinity?
For every grain of sand is a mystery; so is every daisy in summer, and so is every snow-flake in winter. Both upwards and downwards, and all around us, science and speculation pass into mystery at last.
Augustine, the father of theologians, was walking on the ocean shore and pondering over the truth, "three distinct persons, not separate, but distinct; and yet but one God;" and he came upon a little boy that was playing with a colored seashell, scooping a hole in the sand, and then going down to the waves and getting his shell full of water and putting it into the hole. Augustine said, "What are you doing, my little fellow?" The boy replied, "I am going to pour the sea into that hole." "Ah," said Augustine, "that is what I have been attempting. Standing at the ocean of infinity, I have attempted to grasp it with my finite mind."
Were there no mysteries in the Bible, we should doubt its being the transcript of the Eternal Mind. The "mystery of godliness" adapts it to our ruined race. Those mysteries of the Bible are like the mountains of the world; they give grandeur to the landscape and fertility to the soil.
The mysteries of the Bible should teach us, at one and the same time, our nothingness and our greatness; producing humility, and animating hope. I bow before these mysteries. I knew that I should find them, and I pretend not to remove them. But whilst I thus prostrate myself, it is with deep gladness and exultation of spirit. God would not have hinted the mystery, had He not hereafter designed to explain it. And, therefore, are my thoughts on a far-off home, and rich things are around me, and the voices of many harpers, and the shinings of bright constellations, and the clusters of the cherub and the seraph; and a whisper, which seems not of this earth, is circulating through the soul, "Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known."
The Bible tells me explicitly that Christ was God; and it tells me, as explicitly that Christ was man. It does not go on to state the modus or manner of the union. I stop, therefore, where the Bible stops. I bow before a God-man as my Mediator, but I own as inscrutable the mysteries of His person.
In viewing the scheme of redemption, I seem like one viewing a vast and complicated machine of exquisite contrivance; what I comprehend of it is wonderful, what I do not, is, perhaps, more so still.
Providence is a greater mystery than revelation.
That great chain of causes, which, linking one to another, even to the throne of God Himself, can never be unraveled by any industry of ours.
—Burke.
Ah, what a life is theirs who live in Christ;
How vast the mystery!
Reaching in height to heaven, and in its depth
The unfathomed sea!
We know, and we feel, that the vast business of our redemption, arranged in the councils of the far-back eternity, and acted out amid the wonderings and throbbings of the universe, could not have been that stupendous transaction which gave God glory by giving sinners safety, if the inspired account brought its dimensions within the compass of a human arithmetic, or defined its issues by the lines of a human demarcation.
The nature of Christ is, I grant it, from one end to another, a web of mysteries; but this mysteriousness does not correspond to the difficulties which all existence contains. Let it be rejected, and the whole world is an enigma; let it be accepted, and we possess a wonderful explanation of the history of man.
Between the mysteries of death and life
Thou standest, loving, guiding,—not explaining;
We ask, and Thou art silent,—yet we gaze,
And our charmed hearts forget their drear complaining;
No crushing fate, no stony destiny!
Thou Lamb that hast been slain, we rest in Thee.
Can any thing be more mysterious than the union of soul and body, unless it be the still greater mystery, which some have professed to believe, that matter can be so organized as to produce the amazing intellectual results which we witness in man? In believing our own existence we believe a mystery as great as any that the Christian religion presents.
At some turning point of your life, when some great joy flashed, or some great shadow darkened upon you all at once; when some crisis that wanted an instantaneous decision appeared,—why, what regions of thought, purpose, plan, resolution, what wildernesses of desolate sorrow, and what paradises of blooming gladness, your soul has gone through in a moment.
We live in the midst of infinite existence; and widely as we can see, and vastly as we have discovered, we have but crossed the threshold, we have but entered the vestibule of the Creator's temple. In this temple there is an everlasting worship of life, an anthem of many choruses, a hymn of incense that goes up forever.
We are children shut up as yet in the narrow hollow of our native valley, with all the universe, outside the closely engirdling hills, for a great wonderland, of which we dream childish dreams, as the light of morning or evening kindles from beyond. "Laws of Nature"—what dost thou know of them, O man? Look out on the great miracles of nature, blooming in flowers and stars, away to the gates of the city of God, what dost thou know of its laws and wonders?
Lo, these are parts of His ways; but how little a portion is heard of Him.
—Bible.
We comprehend the earth only when we have known heaven. Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma.