He has great love for Nature, and sees the symbolical value of material beauty and its effect on man.
He has great fellow-feeling with the joys and sorrows of men. Hence he is always on the side of the suffering, and especially of the oppressed; all his sermons and lectures indicate this. It endears him to millions, and also draws upon him the hatred and loathing of a few Pharisees, some of them members of his own sect.
Listen to this:—
"Looked at without educated associations, there is no difference between a man in bed and a man in a coffin. And yet such is the power of the heart to redeem the animal life, that there is nothing more exquisitely refined and pure and beautiful than the chamber of the house. The couch! From the day that the bride sanctifies it, to the day when the aged mother is borne from it, it stands clothed with loveliness and dignity. Cursed be the tongue that dares speak evil of the household bed! By its side oscillates the cradle. Not far from it is the crib. In this sacred precinct, the mother's chamber, lies the heart of the family. Here the child learns its prayer. Hither, night by night, angels troop. It is the Holy of Holies."
How well he understands the ministry of grief!
"A Christian man's life is laid in the loom of time to a pattern which he does not see, but God does; and his heart is a shuttle. On one side of the loom is sorrow, and on the other is joy; and the shuttle, struck alternately by each, flies back and forth, carrying the thread, which is white or black, as the pattern needs; and in the end, when God shall lift up the finished garment, and all its changing hues shall glance out, it will then appear that the deep and dark colors were as needful to beauty as the bright and high colors."
He loves children, and the boy still fresh in his manhood.
"When your own child comes in from the street, and has learned to swear from the bad boys congregated there, it is a very different thing to you from what it was when you heard the profanity of those boys as you passed them. Now it takes hold of you, and makes you feel that you are a stockholder in the public morality. Children make men better citizens. Of what use would an engine be to a ship, if it were lying loose in the hull? It must be fastened to it with bolts and screws, before it can propel the vessel. Now a childless man is just like a loose engine. A man must be bolted and screwed to the community before he can begin to work for its advancement; and there are no such screws and bolts as children."
He has a most Christ-like contempt for the hypocrite, whom he scourges with heavy evangelical whips,—but the tenderest Christian love for earnest men struggling after nobleness.
Read this:—