Words are leaves, prayers bloom, and deeds fruit. If the tree has grown up under religious influence the kernel contains seeds of immortality, but if reared under the influence of sin the kernel will be a rotten core and worse than useless.
To love and to sing is to live, and to hate and to swear is to die.
Bad deeds, though often written and rewritten, soil the hands of the scribe, corrupt his heart, taint the olfactory senses of the reader—although they may be as angels—with an unpleasant odour, offend their eyes, and become in the end illegible blotches, smudges, and smears.
Good deeds, performed with a good object, eat themselves clearly and legibly into the pages of history, which time turns into gold, and leave a pleasant impression upon the writers and readers—although they may be devils—that time and men’s hands cannot efface.
Those who write flashy, misleading lies of various hues, whether about gipsy, saint, or angel, will find that they are earning red-hot coppers, which “puffs” will not prevent burning the author’s fingers and scratching his conscience.
Worldly-minded human beings engaged in trying to weave a cloak of righteousness out of their own evil deeds wherewith to hide their deformities, ugliness, and consumption, may be compared to a poor old deformed woman trying to weave a golden cloak out of rotten straw to hide the wretchedness and misery of Seven Dials.
Those engaged in reclaiming children from sin and ignorance are making themselves a silver ladder upon which to climb to golden fame.
When our ways are clouded by mysteries and doubts, we may take it for granted that we have got off the road, and are wandering among marshes and swamps from which fogs and poisonous vapours arise.
Satan often ties firebrands to the tails of hypocritical professing Christians, and uses them as Samson did his foxes.
At 6.30 on Tuesday morning I stepped out of doors with my travelling paraphernalia upon some six-inches deep of newly fallen snow. My only light was the flickering gas, which was miserable indeed. Underneath the snowy carpet the roads felt, and in fact were, like a sheet of glass. If the new soles upon my shoes had been beeswaxed and polished I could not have slipped and slurred about more. Sometimes my bags were in the snow, and at other times I was trying the resisting force of the lamp-posts. Some of the workmen as they passed me rolled about as if they were “tight,” and I daresay they thought me to be a brother chip. After three-quarters of an hour’s exercise for patience, temper, and legs, I arrived “safe and sound in wind and limb” in a third-class compartment, and without any hot-water bottles to cheer my onward course.