We should teach our children nothing which they shall ever need to unlearn; we should strive to transmit to them the best possessions, the truest thought, the noblest sentiments of the age in which we live.
The moral ferment that has worked from the beginning in human nature is active still. To-day it is manifest in the great social problems that agitate our age, demanding a higher justice, if they are to be solved, threatening social disruption if they are met in the hard spirit of selfish greed, while promising a fairer future than the world has yet seen if dealt with in wisdom and forbearance.
The frontier of the higher life is everywhere contiguous to the common life, and we can cross the border at any moment. The higher life is as real as the grosser things in which we put our trust. But our eyes must be anointed so that we may see it.
The office of the religious teacher is to be a seer, and to make others see, and thus to win them into the upward way.
They have not grasped the whole truth who see in the sympathetic side of human nature, in the tender and amiable impulses of the heart, the well-spring of our moral judgments. These gentle qualities—pity, tenderness, sympathy—are the sweet, younger sisters of Virtue; but Virtue herself is greater than they.