John Morrison Davidson

“ Discussing the problem of the immortality of the soul, he says, "We should not repine if the larger life beyond death remains a hope too grand for any earthly form. I live,—this I know; and all around me is a Power, immeasurable, inscrutable, of which I can only think that it lives more grandly and mightily than I, folding me in its embrace, and making a reverent feeling of my own nothingness the supreme bliss. ”

“ Now, such a man has far more trust in the Lord than ever he supposes. Through despair of presenting that inconceivable Being in any form whatever to his consciousness, he fancies that he dispenses with the thought entirely. But the more nearly he comes to a realization of oneness in that system of the universe which he thinks he has wrought out, the more nearly does he come to the thought of God. ”

“ Picton has cleft through the materialistic jungle be arduous for ordinary mortals to tread, it is, in my opinion, the best that has yet been cleared. "Narrow is the way that leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." ”

“ Whatever tenfold complicated change has happened or may come, however strangely the bounds which now limit my personal life may be broken through, however unimaginably my consciousness of God may be enlarged, it is impossible that the more real can be merged in the less real ”

“ Finding no place therein for a God such as he was taught to speak about and dream about in his childish years, he calmly says, 'There is no God at all.' ... He is confident in his system of the universe, and is assured that it always works together under the same conditions to the same ends. ”

“ All religions, properly so called, conceive of phenomena as the outcome of an eternal, incomprehensible power, "which makes for righteousness" throughout the universe. Every irreligious system, on the other hand, regards the phenomenal altogether apart from its source. The question then arises. Which way of looking at the mighty enigma is the more philosophic? ”

“ The gifted authoress of "The True History of Joshua Davidson" hazards the prediction that if Christ, who "went about doing good," were to re-appear on the earth in our day, it would be in the character of a Radical politician; and, if it is meant simply that the platform and the press are now more powerful agencies for good or evil than the pulpit, it were hard to differ from her. Able, single-minded men like Picton are sadly wanted in Parliament; and the churches will, as a rule, be glad to be rid of persons of such "dangerous tendencies." ”

“ Picton makes a clean sweep of the supernatural, but imparts to the natural a lofty significance which more than compensates for the loss. "All forms of finite existence may, for aught I care, be reduced to modes of motion; but motion itself has become to me only the manifestation of the energy of an infinite life, in "which it is a joy to be lost. ”

“ The more confidently he rests in the certain working of moral as well as of physical laws, the more does he manifest that which, in our minds, is equivalent to trust in the Lord. Under any form of religion, and under no form of professed religion, then, the exhortation of the text, 'Trust in the Lord and do good,' may be carried out, and its creed asserted." In a word, Mr. Picton's charity induces him to ascribe religion to the professedly irreligious. ”

“ The same intellectual constitution which makes science possible—the impulse to seek after the reason of things and their completeness—implies in its very germ an already existing, though inarticulate, belief in ultimate substance and in an infinite unity. ”

“ Our positivist brethren will, of course, seek to impugn the validity of such reasoning; but they are, as a rule, persons so superstitiously anti-superstitious that their objections may be discounted almost by anticipation. ”

“ Coe, the Unitarian minister, and a powerful contingent of Radical working-men, whom he was in the habit of addressing in his chapel on Sunday afternoons on such unhallowed topics as "True Radicalism," "The Rights of Man," the death of Ernest Jones, the Jamaica outrages under Gov. Eyre, &c. As in Galilee, so in Leicester, the common people heard their teacher gladly; but the uncommon folks took a different view of the matter. What amounted to a vote of want of confidence in Mr. Picton 's ministry was passed ”