Chautauqua Institution

“ It nursed the virtues of the household. It made woman the companion of the heart and home; it hallowed marriage; it taught the love of Christ and the brethren, contentment, industry, frugality, sacrifice, and charity to the poor. What picture so fair as in the letters of that time of its fresh, healthful life; that “church in the house,” breathing the soul of the early religion? The kingdom came without observation, without noise; and a new home-born, home-bred society grew in the midst of the dying civilization. ”

“ The mighty Hercules slew the hateful vulture, rent the granite rock, broke the galling chains that bound his limbs, and the unchained hero rises from his granite bed of ages, the pride of all the earth and the envy of the gods. Prometheus chained was ignorance and superstition enthroned; with limbs unfettered he is literature and knowledge sown broadcast in all the land. How fitting a figure then, the language of the toast, ‘The Chautauqua Idea the unchained Prometheus.’ The selfish gods of fortune doomed the Promethean masses to cruel and hopeless bonds of ignorance and illiteracy forever. ”

“ Parents forget that the little child’s troubles are just as serious things to it, as the greater troubles of grown people are to them. The little waves of the bay are as hard on the little boats as the big waves of the sea are on the big ships; and many a child at four or five years of age—younger or older—suffers acutely from sorrows that come, in which it finds no sympathy. We should remember this; and blessed is the minister and blessed is the teacher who has it in his heart to sympathize with and comfort the little people in their sorrows. ”

“ This natural pride and ambition of the soul is very much gratified in the reading of a fable: for in writings of this kind, the reader comes in for half of the performance; everything appears to him like a discovery of his own; he is busied all the while in applying characters and circumstances, and is in this respect both a reader and a composer. It is no wonder, therefore, that on such occasions, when the mind is thus pleased with itself, and amused with its own discoveries, it is highly delighted with the writing which is the occasion of it. ”

“ They are forty thousand strong. A mystic circle binds them round, and every link within the golden chain is set with pearls. O, for some mystic tongue of fire, that I might the better speak the glories of our chosen muse! The world-renowned ‘Chautauqua’ may not sparkle o’er our heads as a constellation in the skies, but if true Chautauquans we prove ourselves to be, we shall far outshine the stars in the kingdom of his love forever and forevermore. ”

“ Vasilko, Iuri’s son, was of comely mien and gracious manners. The Tatars, notwithstanding their ferocity and brutishness, were susceptible to the charm of beauty, and certain among them spoke gently to him: “Stay with us. You shall bear the banner of Batui. He is worthy.” “Never will I put my hand to the banner of the foemen of my country, and of the Lord Christ,” replied Vasilko. “Great as is my woe, ye shall never force me to lift my hand against a Christian. Thy destruction will also come, O heavy and cursed power! There is a God, and you are doomed to perdition. ”

“ It is the problem that presses on us to-day more than ever, when we look at the mingled good and evil of our modern world; when we enter one of our great cities, where wealth glitters as if there were no suffering, yet a step apart there lurks a world of beggary and crime, which our Christianity has hardly pierced, although it has sent a Livingston into the heart of Africa;—what is the hope of Christian more than pagan progress, of a Paris or New York more than a Rome? ”

“ A refined culture is no safeguard against our moral diseases. We repeat often that this American people is abler to keep its freedom and virtue, because of the education of all: yet it is one of those surface truths that may cover a fallacy. I believe heartily in popular education. But there is a more knowing vice as well as virtue. The mob of Paris is more intelligent than the country boor; but it is a witty and polished animal. Such training, without a deeper root, only quickens the weeds in the rank field of our time, and chokes the public conscience. ”

“ Pure religion breathing household laws.
Give your offspring this training of the character; teach them to be frank and open-hearted, to hate a lie or a mean action, to be kind to the poor, to protect the weaker, to respect gray hairs, to reverence your authority from love not fear, to cherish the natural pleasures and employments of home, a book or a ramble more than the finery of modish children young or old; above all to be always constant in their Christian habits, with no affectations of a premature piety, with a child’s faults, but a child’s sweet faith ”

“ Who of us, if he could keep afresh the feeling of awe and tenderness with which he looked on the face of his first-born infant, and felt what an undiscovered world was opened to him, who would ever need to learn his duty? What a work it is, how ceaseless, how growing at each step, how delicate in all its adaptations, how asking all our love, our thoughtfulness, our patience! ”

“ I consider an human soul without education, like marble in the quarry, which shows none of its inherent beauties, till the skill of the polisher fetches out the colors, makes the surface shine, and discovers every ornamental cloud, spot, and vein, that runs through the body of it. Education, after the same manner, when it works upon a noble mind, draws out to view every latent virtue and perfection, which without such helps are never able to make their appearance. ”

“ What is our most perfect theory of government, unless there be a self-governed people? What are commercial rules, if there be no conscience of integrity and honor? Study this truth in its widest bearings. Our time is marked by its noble efforts for reform. We hail each healthy improvement in the condition of the poor, the opening of new channels of labor, the breaking down of false monopolies. ”

“ We may grow in wealth and all the arts of social culture, but let these fast habits of the time, this whirl of our modern life eat into the heart of our home piety, and the whole body must die of its own gangrenes. ”

“ Now, your neighbor yonder with his aches and pains and his sickness, are you sure that he is not in very much the same predicament as this clock? If we could look into the works of his body, are you confident that we should not find them choked up and uncared for, instead of being in the condition in which they were intended to be? His aches and pains, are they not the grating and complaining of deranged and clogged machinery? I am quite aware that sick people generally are not sensible of having allowed anything to come near to their bodies which they ought to have kept away. ”

“ The true generosity of the heart is more displayed by deeds of minor kindness, than by acts which may partake of ostentation.
Be polite. Politeness is the poetry of conduct—and like poetry it has many qualities. Let not your politeness be too florid, but of that gentle kind which indicates refined nature.
Be sociable—avoid reserve in society. Remember that the social elements, like the air we breathe, are purified by motion. Thought illumines thought, and smiles win smiles. ”

“ I give the answer, which I think all history as well as the Gospel gives. The purity of the household is the salt of our civilization. I know no other answer. Need I then, state the ground on which such a truth rests? The only lasting influence which can preserve or heal the social body is one that works from the root. We can not, with dreamers like Rousseau, believe the savage better than the civilized state. Art and science bring manifold vices with the good, yet we can never grapple with the sins of our day by vague railing against luxury. ”

“ They are light with the buoyancy of the zephyr or of the gossamer wafted in its bosom. They are light also with the luminousness of the sun-beam, kindling beauty and light and warmth as it flashes along its track. The writings of Hood are to be laughed at, but they who only laugh at them have no true appreciation of their subtle power. They disparage them for their mirthfulness, because they can not discover the depths below the dimpling surface of their rolling humor. ”

“ Now that smell is really a vapor, bred of decay in the manure, and then steaming up from it into the air. If our eyes were as sharp as our noses, we should be able to see a host of little bodies rushing up from the manure, and scattering themselves through the air. It is because some of those little bodies strike upon the lining of our noses, as they are drawn in by our breathing, that we smell the unpleasant odor. The nose feels the touch of those bodies as a smell.
Wherever substances which have been alive, are dead and undergoing decay, vapors of this kind are bred and steamed forth. ”

“ Thus the breath which goes into the mouth is fresh air; but the breath which comes out of the mouth is foul air. Air is spoiled, and, as it were, converted to poison, by being breathed; but the body is purified by the breathing, because it is its poison-vapors that are carried away, mingled with the spoiled air.
This, then, is why men breathe. Breathing is the blowing of a fresh wind through the living body for the cleansing away of its impurities. The purifying part of the air which is breathed actually circulates with the blood through all parts of the frame. ”

“ It is a bad thing if, through shame or fear of being laughed at, a girl fails to tell the sweetest and deepest and richest things of her heart’s life to her own mother. Blessed is the home where the girl is trained never to keep anything from her mother, and where the boy is trained always to confide in father. Boys and girls who are brought up with that confidence never go to ruin. ”

“ It is the apocalyptic angel flying through the midst of heaven with the everlasting truth that shall fill the world with light and joy. I see the mystic band with robes of light and arms of love, from every walk of life, while joy and peace sit undisturbed upon their brows. ”

“ See how earnest the apostles of evil are to allure men to destruction, through one or other of the several avenues that lead to death; and shall we be less eager to labor for their salvation? Behold how indefatigable are the endeavors of those who live to spread abroad the news of every day! What telegraphic agencies they use to bring to this one center the record of important occurrences the world over! What magnificent machinery they employ to multiply the number of impressions of their journals! ”

“ But the knowledge of nature is only half the task of a poet; he must be acquainted likewise with all the modes of life. His character requires that he estimate the happiness and misery of every condition, observe the power of all the passions in all their combinations, and trace the changes of the human mind as they are modified by various institutions, and accidental influences of climate or custom, from the sprightliness of infancy to the despondency of decrepitude. He must divest himself of the prejudices of his age or country ”

“ There has been no more favorite field for our philosophers than that of the origin of human government. Some have fancied that men met together in formal compact; others have held the state of nature that of a pack of wolves, at last brought together by self-interest to choose some kingly wolf, who could keep the peace; and we have to-day our sages, so enamored of their researches into comparative anatomy, that they can pass by all the nobler facts of social history, and find the primitive man in some anthropoid ape. ”

“ If there be no enthusiasm within us for the diffusion of the Gospel, or the conversion of sinners, we make it only too apparent that we have not the spirit of Christ; but if our souls are stirred at the sight of our perishing fellow-men, and our hearts prompt us to make efforts for their salvation, we prove that we are in sympathy with those celestial beings among whom there is “joy over one sinner that repenteth,” and that the same mind is in us which was in him who died that men might be redeemed. ”

“ There are defects in our American homes. What are they? There are defects which characterize us as well as other nations, in this nineteenth century; and defects which are the products or the results of our peculiar doctrines of society and of government. As we go about in our neighborhoods; as we travel to and fro in the land, read the papers and listen to lectures and sermons on the subject, we find peculiar evils that exist to-day in American families. It is to look at the dark side of the American home that we are met to-night. ”