Cold places of worship, with a shivering minister as doorkeeper, are the places to turn warm Christians into freezing saints.
A drunken Christian minister is a toppled-over guide-post with the bottom rotted off, owing to its having being set in too much water.
Hope is the second—love the first—greatest moral force in the world. When a man is down in the gutter it lifts him up; when he is in darkness it puts light in his face and fire in his eyes. It enters the breast of a child; it fills the heart, and is seen in every action of man; it is in the soul of kings, governs empires, and rules destinies; and it lifts human beings, populating all worlds, from earth and hell to heaven. Oh! bliss-inspiring hope!
Hope is the father of ambition and the earthly companion of the soul; they join together till they come to the edge of the river, whence the soul takes its flight into eternity, and hope becomes the life of the fame left behind, and ends with fame’s death.
Despair is the wastrel daughter of ambition forsaken by her father, and her mother, hope and pride. She drags all who touch her to poverty, ruin, degradation, misery, and death. When she creeps do you run.
Elevating natural parental love buds in time and blooms through eternity. It turns a mud cottage or gipsy wigwam into a palace, a desert into a garden, a waste into an earthly paradise. It causes the birds and variegated songsters to chirp and sing round your dwelling, the trees to laugh, the stones to shout, the cat to purr upon the hearth, and the children to kiss and fondle upon your knees. It sends whole families where love dwells off to bed in good humour, and causes the cock to crow early in the morning at your door, telling you that a diviner love is about to enter your family circle with a fragrance excelling that of the rose, and its effects more lovely to behold than that of the lily.
The soil of earth is the brain of nature.
Children with good hearts and lovable dispositions, under the fostering care of a good, kind, Christian mother, will become God’s pretty little singing birds, to beautify and enliven His heavenly garden; while naughty, disobedient, bad children will become worse than rotten eggs, not even fit for manure.
As bells are placed upon the necks of leading wether sheep to give out a sound of danger and guidance, so in like manner is the word of God placed upon the necks of His ministers, to give out words of consolation, counsel, reproof, and warning, and woe be to those who give out an uncertain sound.
Gipsies, vagrants, tramps, and vagabonds are the corns and bunions of society.