Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

up the difficult paths, and strengthening our hearts. So may thy will be done, on earth and in heaven.

A. B. ALCOTT.

SAYINGS.

-If one's life is not worshipful, no one cares for his professions. Piety is a sentiment: the more natural it is, the wholesomer. Nor is there piety where charity is wanting. "If one love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen." None are deceived as to the spirit of their acquaintances: the instinct of every village, every home, intimates true character. We recognize goodness wherever we find it. 'Tis the same helpful influence, beautifying the meanest as the greatest service by its manners, doing most when least conscious, as if he did it not. Let us have unspoken creeds and these quick and operative.

-Persist in being yourself, and against fate and yourself. Faith and persistency are life's architects, while doubt and despair bury all under the ruins of any endeavor. You may pull all your paradises about your ears save your earliest; that is to be yours sometime. Strive and have; still striving till striving is having. We mount to heaven mostly on the ruins of our cherished schemes, finding our failures were successes. Nor need we turn sour if we fail to draw the prizes in life's lottery. It were the speck in the fruit, the falling of our manliness into decay. These blanks were all prizes had we the equanimity to take them without whimpering or discontent.

-There is no appeal from the decisions of this High Court of Duty in the breast. The Ought is the Must and the Inevitable. One may misinterpret the voice, may deliberate, disobey the commandment, but cannot escape the consequences of his election. The deed decides.

-Nor is any man greatest standing apart in his individualism; his strength and dignity come by sympathy with the aims of the best men of the community of which he is a member. Yet whoever seeks the crowd, craving popularity for propping repute, forfeits his claim to reverence and expires in the incense he inhales. Stand fast by your convictions and there maintain yourself against every odds. One with yourself, you are one with Almighty God, and a majority against all the world.

-Love you none? Then are you lost. Love is the key to felicity; nor is there a heaven to him who has it not.

-There is nothing like comparative divinity for emancipating the mind from traditional teachings. Like travel it opens out new and distant regions of the globe of knowledge, and shows the real relations of things to one another.

-What becomes of an age whose youth knows too much? Like the old princes eager to pluck the forbidden pleasures from the stem; the brazen, following fast childhood's golden period, and leaping wildly into the iron, the five points of license; the beautiful bashfulness, nature's ornament and foil, the preserver of chastity, torn, trodden, and lost!

-A period of the world like ours, when thought is so actively engaged in all subjects affecting human welfare, must be deficient in the spiritual element if it have not a solvent for fusing the current creeds, and recombining these in a fresher faith, sufficient for the present, if not for some future generations. In the general diffusion of light, no one can hold the community of minds under the shadow of his special thought, since the revelations made to all races in times past are culminating in a purer dispensation, suited to the new needs of the centuries.

RELIGION AND SCIENCE.

Fear and wonder are the chief elements of superstition. These are supplied by ignorance. Courage and composure come of knowledge, and grow with it.

The study of the natural sciences—including as it does, the habit of requiring strict proof-constantly diminishes that credulity through which superstition enters, and on which it feeds. Reason and knowledge are conscious of their fallible workings; and therefore do they tolerate differences of opinion. They inspire diffidence as much as ignorance does positiveness. Natural science has already done much to weaken and dispel superstition. It has put astronomy in the place of astrology, and made alchemy and the hunt for the "Philosopher's Stone," and for the "Universal Solvent," give place to Chemistry. It has liberated millions from their degrading bondage to the authority of sacred books, and left their reason as free to play of the Bible as us upon upon the pages the pages of any other book. While the mass of men construct their God out of their dreams and delusions, they who study the natural sciences are carried up through certainties to the certain God. The one imagine, and the other prove the existence and character of God.

The religion of human nature is harmony, not only with human nature, but with all Nature and with God. For every part of Nature is harmonious with every other part of it, and all Nature is in harmony with the Author of all Nature.

And what will become of the Bible when men shall cease to take it as an authority, and to worship it as a fetish, and to possess and prize it as a charm or an amulet? Rather ask, what will become of it in the mean time, and during the superstitious regard for it. For there is no little danger that an age of growing intelligence, disgusted with the exaggerated claims for the Bible, will reject it. But when this book shall, like any other book, be submitted to human judgment, and men feel at liberty to discriminate between the merits of its different parts-as, for instance, the incredible story of Jonah and the whale, and the felt truth of the sermon on the Mount-then will it be a new and inestimable blessing.

Will there, when the priests are gone, be still a demand for preachers? Yes, greater than ever! What will they preach?

Will they, like the priests, spend the time in telling their hearers what religion is? Oh, no; a minute a month will suffice for that! In a dozen words they can say that loving God supremely and the neighbor as ourself, or more briefly, that being true to ourself, is religion; or still more briefly, that being ourself is religion. But the question remains, What will they preach? They will preach duties, they will tell their hearers what religion calls for in the heart and life. And what shall we do for churches when the present ones shall have died out with the priests? We shall have infinitely better; for we shall then have temples in which reason will do as much to enlighten and elevate, as superstition does in the present churches to darken and degrade.

I affirm the supreme importance of religion. The next life is but the continuation of this; and we begin there just where we leave off here. If we are upon low planes here, we shall enter upon low planes there. If here we sustain high relations to wisdom and goodness, we shall there also.-Gerritt Smith.

DISAPPOINTMENT-A TEACHER IN GOD'S SCHOOL.

God keeps a school for his children on earth; and one of his best teachers is named Disappointment. He is a rough teacher; severe in tone and harsh in handling, sometimes, but his tuition is worth all it costs us. We do not pretend to be a very apt learner, but many of our best lessons through life have been taught us by that same stern old schoolmaster, Disappointment.

One lesson we learned was not to be selfish, or imagine that this world was all made for us. If it had been, the sun would have shone just when our hay needed curing, and the rains would have fallen only when our garden thirsted for water. But we found that God ordered things to please himself, and And when our schemes were broken up, and our journey spoiled by the storm, the stern schoolmaster said: "The world was not made for you alone. Do not be selfish. Your

not us.

loss is another's gain. The rain that spoils your hay makes your neighbor's corn grow the faster. The fall in wheat that cuts down your profits will help the poor widow in yonder cottage to buy bread for her hungry little mouths next winter. Your loss is another man's gain. Don't be selfish.”

On a grand scale, sometimes, this lesson is taught. When a certain ambitious self-seeker once clutched at the dominion of all Europe, stern Disappointment met him in his path of invasion, flung a Russian snow-storm in his face, and out of the tiny snow-flakes wove a white shroud to wrap the flower of French chivalry. The lesson that the proud usurper would not learn at Aspern and Eylau was taught him in the agonies of Borodino, and in ghastly blood prints on the frozen banks of the Beresina. His successor, the third Napolcon, has been taught, lately, the same lesson: "All Europe does not belong to you." So, too, have we, in the defeat of our humbler plans of self-seeking, been made to hear the sharp teacher say: "Do not be selfish. God did not make this world just for you. Other people have rights as well as yourself." This lesson was worth all it cost us.

A second lesson which Disappointment has taught us is, that our losses are not only gains, sometimes, to others, but very often the richest gains to ourselves. In our short-sighted ignorance, we had "devised a way," and set our hearts upon it. Had we been allowed to pursue it, we must have been led by it to ruin.

The record-book of every Christian's life has some pages in it which were written at the bidding of that severe teacher, Disappointment. Tears may have blotted and blurred the page at the time. But as we turn over that page now, and read it in the light of experience, we can write beneath it : "Thank God for those losses! they were my everlasting gain. Thank God for those bereavements! they have saved my soul from being bereaved of heaven. All things work together for good to them that love God; to them who are the called according to his purpose."

« ForrigeFortsæt »