Charles Reynolds Brown

“ Serious men cannot bring themselves to believe in anything so absurd. These forces which produce attachment to the right, devotion to the helpless, faithful affection, are universal forces.
“O heart I made, a heart beats here”—that was the word of God through the lips of the poet! These forces of love and grace are universal and enduring as the stars. To fight them spells defeat. To coöperate with them, bringing the scattered and aimless activities of the life into harmony with the supreme purpose of God declared in Jesus Christ, means life abundant and eternal. ”

“ And finally this young man set in the sky of human aspiration a fixed star of hope. You cannot change the world by scolding it. You cannot change the world by petting it. You must set before its eyes a vision of God and in its heart a passion for goodness, and in its will a form of strength that will not accept defeat, and in its sky a star of hope.
"Strong Son of God, Immortal Love
Whom we that have not seen Thy face
By faith and faith alone embrace
Believing where we cannot prove." ”

“ It is the power of vision cherished and cultivated more actively, perhaps, by women than by men. When her child is first laid in her arms it is only a bit of red flesh—that is all the canary in the window or the thoughtless observer who cares not for children would see. This bit of existence, so undeveloped as to have nothing one could call moral life, no power to choose or to aspire; so undeveloped as to have nothing one could call mental life, no power of recognition, discrimination, inference, has only the power to cry and to feed. ”

“ If it is good for men to be sober and clean in war time, why not at all times? Have we not sore need of these same qualities in the more exacting pursuits of peace? Every man who is worthy of the name of man is set to guard some sacred interest, though he carries neither gun nor sword.
Here is the everlasting fight being waged three hundred and sixty-five days in the year—and it is waged year in and year out for there is no discharge in that war—against hunger and cold, against disease and death, against poverty and crime! ”

“ Just how is right rewarded and wrong punished when the two are so intricately interwoven? No man is so white a sheep but that there are patches of goat about him here and there. No man is so bad but that there is some good in him if we observingly distil it out. And what of the final outcome—can good people be happily content if the sinful souls they loved are in conscious pain or even if they have been remorselessly wiped off the slate of existence? Is it too much to hope that God’s persuasions to righteousness being infinite may prove irresistible and so at last successful in every case? ”

“ It is easy for any man to fall in love with some beautiful woman—it is as easy as rolling off a log, and ever so much more delightful. It is easy for any man to inhale the sweet incense which arises from the devotion of some affectionate woman's heart. But where a man loves a man in an unsullied, unselfish friendship until his soul is knit with the soul of that man in an interlacing and interlocking of interest, then you have that harder, rarer form of human relationship which is rich with promise. ”

“ The student who spends on vice or dissipation, money furnished by his father for term bills, entering them up in his financial statement as “sundries” or what not, is a whelp and a cad, no matter how good looking he is or how well his dress suit fits him! Dirt is dirt no matter how we may adorn it with lace; a lie is a lie, and theft is theft, no matter how they are smoothed over with fine words! There ought to be in all college life rigid, unsympathetic honesty, like that of the bank or the counting-room. ”

“ The hard task of presenting to Him a life which will bear His own eye and win His approval will mortgage the best strength of all your best years.
You may have the body of an athlete. You may have a mind with splendid capacity in it for real achievement. You may have a heart which reacts as promptly as gunpowder when a spark of genuine aspiration is applied to it. You may have all these—I hope you have—but unless you have learned the high art of staying by, of holding on, of keeping at it no matter what comes, you are doomed to defeat. ”

“ Will you not take pains to cultivate the power of turning aside to see the great sights awaiting you all in the sheep pastures of earth, in all scenes of industry and in all places of trade, in all lines of civic effort and in all forms of charitable intent, in every schoolroom and in every home? Will you not turn and with heightened power of vision see there the hidden, unrealized possibilities? ”

“ Why not have men at their best in the mill and in the mine, on the farm and in the factory, in the counting-room and in the places of trade? The armies which are sent forth to save, to feed, and to clothe men's lives, no less than the armies of bloodshed have need of the same high discipline. They, too, are crippled and broken, they are driven back and hurled to defeat by those moral foes which march under the banner of self-indulgence.
Here is an evil traffic which flaunts its wares in our faces in every city block where the forces of righteousness have not risen in strength to cast it out. ”

“ The whole wretched habit of life comes from the lack of the power of vision, the inability to put these matters in right perspective, the great things great and the small things small.
Your real life does not consist in what you have. Your real life does not consist in what you are actually able to do. Your real life does not consist even, as men often say, in what you are. Your real life consists in what you see as possible and desirable for you, and in that capacity you feel stirring within you to gain all that sometime! ”

“ He did it by changing men's thoughts about God—"To us there is but one God, the Father." He did it by changing men's conception of goodness—to be good is to be like Him, simple, genuine, spontaneous, in our love and practice of the right life. He did it by changing the hearts of men from within—"If any man is in Christ he is a new creature." He did it by setting in our human sky a fixed star of hope to shine on until the day dawns and the shadows flee away. ”

“ It is for you who stand on the slopes of Horeb, the mountains of God, by reason of the higher education you have received to cultivate this power by a spirit of obedient trust and by the habit of loving service. In every situation form the habit of turning aside from the commonplace shapes which engage your eyes that you may see some great and significant sight. Watch for the bush which burns with a mysterious fire! ”

“ It is up out of those moments of contrition when men are humbled and broken before God that the spiritual impulses come which are to beat back the forces of evil and make this earth at last as fair as the sky.
I care not what the man's outward station may be—he may live on the Avenue or he may live in the slums; he may be clothed in purple or he may be dressed in rags; he wear a Phi Beta Kappa key or he may be so untaught that he has to make his mark when he signs a mortgage—in any event here is a prayer which will fit his lips—it fits every pair of lips: "God be merciful to me, a sinner." ”

“ The truth of the first statement we see at a glance, for the blood, the inner life-quality, of any nation shapes its history. And the second statement is equally true; if the history of a nation is stained by incessant warfare, if generation after generation consents to the destruction of those courageous, virile young men whose hearts respond readily to the call for heroic sacrifice, such a history eliminates from the blood of that nation those very elements which it sorely needs. ”

“ And when David increased year after year in stature, in wisdom, and in favour with God and men, Saul tried repeatedly to kill him. His soul cried out, "Let me feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him."
It is not easy for any man, especially a young man with hot, red blood in his veins and the sense of injustice rankling in his heart, to stand up in the face of hatred and malice and keep sweet about it. "Love your enemies. Bless them who curse you. Do good to them that hate you. Pray for those who despitefully use you." ”

“ The highest return for doing anything lies in the power one gains to do it better and to do more of it. The reward for reading is not in the information gained or in the ideas acquired so much as in the mental stimulus which comes, enabling one to read more books and better ones and in time to produce ideas of his own. The artist goes out into the world to see the beauty of it in tree and flower, in landscape and mountain, in the quiet lake, and in the restless sea. His reward comes in increased power to see more beauty there than other people see and to transfer what he sees to canvas. ”

“ If a man falls out of a fifth story window in New York, in Constantinople, or in Calcutta, the law of gravitation is there and the man gets hurt. The moral order never forgets anything, never overlooks anything. What men sow, they reap, though the harvest be long delayed. If they sow to the flesh, sometime, somewhere they go out with bruised hands and bleeding hearts to reap corruption. When they sow to the spirit they will in the same inevitable way reap life eternal. Here at last the man of purpose and of faith is reaping the results of discipline bravely met and nobly borne. ”

“ Let the church and the university join hands in helping the people of our country to realize that when the final estimates are made up, it will not be “Blessed are the warmakers,” but “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.” How mighty would be the influence of the thirty millions of professing Christians in our own land in shaping public opinion, in determining our national policy, could their hearts be really fired with the magnificent principles and the passion for human well-being which possessed the heart of the Prince of Peace! ”

“ The ultimate shaping of its life is in the hands of the men who walk the busy streets and dusty lanes with their feet on the ground but with their heads and their hearts among the stars. The men of vision and faith sometimes lose a skirmish; now and then they are defeated in a battle; but when the war is fought through to a finish they are on the winning side. ”

“ There are church services in which he will refuse to participate, but sincere, reverent, and rational worship will commend itself to him as a suitable expression of that deeper something growing within his heart. The upward look, the outward reach of a higher aspiration, the need of a hand-clasp which is not of earth, all these appeal to him! Let the music, the lessons, the prayers, and the atmosphere of the church be made a true, good, and beautiful expression of intelligent worship and the thoughtful student will rejoice in the aid it gives him in working out his problems. ”