Edwin Hubbel Chapin Quotes - Page 7

The individual and the race are always moving, and as we drift into new latitudes new lights open in the heaven more immediately over us.

Profaneness is a brutal vice. He who indulges in it is no gentleman, I care not what his stamp may be in society; I care not what clothes he wears, or what culture he boasts.

I should not like to preach to a congregation who all believed as I believe. I would as lief preach to a basket of eggs in their smooth compactness and oval formality.

It is not enjoined upon us to forget, but we are told to forgive, our enemies.

The productions of the press, fast as steam can make and carry them, go abroad through all the land, silent as snowflakes, but potent as thunder. It is an additional tongue of steam and lightning, by which a man speaks his first thought, his instant argument or grievance, to millions in a day.

The minister should preach as if he felt that although the congregation own the church, and have bought the pews, they have not bought him. His soul is worth no more than any other man's, but it is all he has, and he cannot be expected to sell it for a salary. The terms are by no means equal. If a parishioner does not like the preaching, he can go elsewhere and get another pew, but the preacher cannot get another soul.

A great many men - some comparatively small men now - if put in the right position, would be Luthers and Columbuses.

We may learn by practice such things upon earth as shall be of use to us in heaven. Piety, unostentatious piety, is never out of place.

Earth has scarcely an acre that does not remind us of actions that have long preceded our own, and its clustering tombstones loom up like reefs of the eternal shore, to show us where so many human barks have struck and gone down.

Man gains wider dominion by his intellect than by his right arm. The mustard-seed of thought is a pregnant treasury of vast results. Like the germ in the Egyptian tombs its vitality never perishes; and its fruit will spring up after it has been buried for long ages.

Pure felicity is reserved for the heavenly life; it grows not in an earthly soil.

We move too much in platoons; we march by sections; we do not live in our vital individuality enough; we are slaves to fashion, in mind and in heart, if not to our passions and appetites.

Impatience dries the blood sooner than age or sorrow.

Why, man of idleness, labor has rocked you in the cradle, and nourished your pampered life; without it, the woven silk and the wool upon your bank would be in the shepherd's fold. For the meanest thing that ministers to human want, save the air of heaven, man is indebted to toil; and even the air, in God's wise ordination, is breathed with labor.

God's beneficence streams out from the morning sun, and his love looks down upon us from the starry eyes of midnight. It is his solicitude that wraps us in the air, and the pressure of his hand, so to speak, that keeps our pulses beating. O! it is a great thing to realize that the Divine Power is always working; that nature, in every valve and every artery, is full of the presence of God.

Ostentation is the signal flag of hypocrisy.

At the bottom of not a little of the bravery that appears in the world, there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they have not the courage to face public opinion.

There is no tariff so injurious as that with which sectarian bigotry guards its commodities. It dwarfs the soul by shutting out truths from other continents of thought, and checks the circulation of its own.

Skepticism has never founded empires, established principals, or changed the world's heart. The great doers in history have always been people of faith.

If angels stoop from visions of more than earthly beauty to spells of less than earthly worth, they are but fallen angels, mingling divine utterances with the babblings of madness, and the madness is not the divineness.

The night comes for the purpose of checking our busy employment, and introducing an interval of repose between the links of our action and our aspiration. It draws its dim curtain around the field of toil. It buries the objects of our handiwork in darkness, and involves them with uncertainty. It comes to the relief of the exhausted body and the tired brain. Our powers, harmonizing with the diurnal revolutions of the earth, fail with the failing light, and a merciful Providence casts around us this mantle of shadow, and snatches us from our occupation.

The weak sinews become strong by their conflict with difficulties.

Can you conceive of anything that so represents the glory, and truth, and marvelousness of God's nature as the idea of peace?

Down below all the crust of human conceptions, of human ideas, Christ sank an artesian well into a source of happiness so pure and blessed that even yet the world does not believe in it.

A patient, humble temper gathers blessings that are marred by the peevish and overlooked by the aspiring.