Church.—The Church is a union of men arising from the fellowship of religious life; a union essentially independent of, and differing from, all other forms of human association.—Rev. Dr. Neander.
A place where misdevotion frames a thousand prayers to saints.—Donne.
She may still exist in undiminished vigor, when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London bridge, to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.—Macaulay.
Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind.—Burke.
God never had a house of prayer but Satan had a chapel there.—De Foe.
The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailors' Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather.—Thoreau.
Circumstances.—Circumstances are the rulers of the weak; they are but the instruments of the wise.—Samuel Lover.
What saves the virtue of many a woman is that protecting god, the impossible.—Balzac.
Civilization.—Mankind's struggle upwards, in which millions are trampled to death, that thousands may mount on their bodies.—Mrs. Balfour.
The old Hindoo saw, in his dream, the human race led out to its various fortunes. First men were in chains which went back to an iron hand. Then he saw them led by threads from the brain, which went upward to an unseen hand. The first was despotism, iron and ruling by force. The last was civilization, ruling by ideas.—Wendell Phillips.