“ It is faith in man that gives us all true human insight. The difference between a photograph and a portrait is this: the photograph gives the outward feature, and stops there; and most of us, when we stand in a photograph saloon to have our picture taken, hide our soul away. The artist sees the soul behind the man, knows him, understands something of his nature, and paints the soul that looks out through the eyes. He sees in the man something which the sun does not exhibit, and makes that something shine on the canvas. The artist in literature sees an ideal humanity, and interprets it. ”

“ Stand not, when the thirst is on him, between a man and his cups. Clear the track for him. Away with the children! he would tread their life out. Away with the wife! he would dash her to death. Away with the cross! he would run it down. Away with the Bible! he would tear it up for the winds. Away with heaven! he considers it worthless as a straw. "Give me the drink! Give it to me! Tho the hands of blood pass up the bowl, and the soul trembles over the pit—the drink! Give it to me! Tho it be pale with tears; tho the froth of everlasting anguish float on the foam—give it to me! ”

“ If God came into the world simply to tell us what God is and what the ideal of humanity is, the gospel would be the saddest message that could be conceived, as delivered to the human race. It would add gloom to the gloom, darkness to the darkness, chains to the chains, despair to despair. He comes not merely to show divinity to us, but to impart divinity to us; rather, to evolve the latent divinity which He first implanted in us. As God has entered into Christ, He will enter into me. Christ says to me: As I am patient, you can become patient; as I am strong, you can become strong ”

“ Every one of those schemes of frenzied finance about which we are reading in these days is a gigantic bloodsucker, with ten million minute tentacles which it stealthily fastens upon the people who do the world's work, and each one of the victims must give up a little of his life for the aggrandizement of our financial Titans. When such schemes flourish, by which men's gains are suddenly swollen to enormous proportions, somebody must be paying for it, and life is always the final payment. It all comes out of the life of the people who are producing the world's wealth. ”

“ What do we need for the salvation of a prosperous life? The answer in one word is consecration. Consecration, that is what we need. There have been men in whom life seemed complete who have yet walked very humbly. They had no pride of life. And why? Because always before them and above them there stood some great principle, some idea, some duty to which their life belonged, not to themselves. All work is modest, all idle self-contemplation is vain. And what the young man needs with his vague aspirations and conceits is to make himself the servant of some worthy purpose. ”

“ What are the struggles of Christian souls except, in the midst of a world that is quite complicated with difficulties, in the midst of a world that is overwhelmed with sorrow, in the midst of a time of severe temptation, to constantly rise and gaze high above the thought of evil, and gaze towards the sun of brightness, and cry for God? And what is the mission of the Christian Church? Is it not to help men and women in their struggle and their sorrow to forget at least at times their pettinesses and degradation to rise to better standards and loftier ideals, and cry for God? ”

“ He fills us with courage and hope; He crowns us with victory. "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them." Sin is ungodliness; Christ makes us to see light in God's light, fills us with His love, attunes our spirit to the infinite music of His perfection. Instead of shutting out the signs of wo, Christ followed an infinitely deeper philosophy; He arrayed Himself in the sackcloth, becoming sin for us who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. We have redemption in His blood, even the forgiveness of sins ”

“ The leaders of society are merely actors, exhibiting on the public stage of history what is common to mankind at large. However insignificant we may be, and however obscure our station, our inner life is not far removed from that of the exalted personages who draw to themselves the attention of the world. The poorest man has his ambitions, his struggles and his reverses; and the first may take as deep a hold upon his heart, and the second call forth as much cunning or wisdom to confront, and the last as much bitterness to endure, as are found in the vicissitudes of a Richelieu or a Napoleon. ”

“ All the old sweetness and humility fade out of his nature. Need I tell you of it? Our streets are full of the pride of life. Its types only, its outer types flash in the splendid carriages and blaze in the fronts of gaudy houses and sweep the floors of drawing-rooms and the aisles of churches. Those types, the mere outward trappings of success, are not wherein the badness lies. The reality is in the hard hearts and selfish tempers and undocile minds which, in the splendor or the squalidness of wealth, show the sad ruin of self-sufficient success, the pride of life. ”

“ You take one side or other in war against drunkenness. Have you the courage to put your foot down right, and say to your companions and friends, "I will never drink intoxicating liquor in all my life; nor will I countenance the habit in others"? Have nothing to do with strong drink. It has turned the earth into a place of skulls, and has stood opening the gate to a lost world to let in its victims; until now the door swings no more upon its hinges, but, day and night, stands wide open to let in the agonized procession of doomed men. ”

“ It is to grasp that atmosphere of life and reality which comes out of the moral law to those who seek it in a living person first—the desire of goodness, the desire, the love, the enthusiasm, the ambition, cost what it may, of doing right because it is right. Oh, my friends, I submit—and I submit it without fear of contradiction—that is an ambition worthy of Englishmen. Certainly we are not dreamers; certainly God has given us practical activity; certainly, whatever we misunderstand, this we can understand, the thirst of the soul for God is the thirst to love goodness because it is right. ”

“ Have we a right to think that man can govern himself, or must we go back and say with Carlyle and Ruskin and Voltaire that the great body of men are incompetent to govern themselves, and a few wise rulers must govern them? Have we a right to believe that all the progress that has thus far been made in science is but an augury of progress far greater, reaching into the illimitable? Have we a right to say that these portraits of a possible humanity, this Portia, this Toby Veck, this Tiny Tim, this ideal man and woman, are real men and real women in possibility, if not in the actualities of life? ”

“ Oh, will you gratify pleasure? Oh, will you stimulate activity, and will you leave me alone? I, yourself, your very self, the foundation of your life, the permanent expression of your immortality—I must be satisfied, and being infinite and immortal, I know but one satisfaction: 'My soul is athirst for God, for the living God; when shall I come, and appear before the presence of God?'"
If that be true, or if it be approximately true, dear friends, let us ask ourselves this morning these questions. Let us be quite practical. What do you mean, you may say for a moment, by the thirst for God? ”

“ Lawrence, and watch the river as it hurries to its destiny at Niagara; if you see the tossing water writhing almost like living creatures anticipating a dreadful destiny and passing over the fall; or if, rising out of what is tragic in nature, you come to what is homely—if, for instance, you see the chestnut woods of spring with an inspiration of quiet joy, or if you see the elms at Worcester or Hereford in our common England in the autumn time with an inspiration of sorrow; wherever you turn with eye or head, with a feeling in your heart, a thought in your mind, nature demands her recognition ”

“ He never attempted to work into that melancholy robe one thread of color, to relieve it with one solitary spangle of rhetoric. Sin was the burden of the life of Christ because it is the burden of our life. Christ has done more than insisted on the reality, the odiousness, the ominousness, of sin—He has laid bare its principle and essence. The New Testament discovers to us the mystery of iniquity as ungodliness; its inmost essence being unbelief in God's truth, the denial of His justice, the rejection of His love, the violation of His law. ”

“ You look at the result of activity, and it is splendid. Imagine, picture for a moment, political achievement; picture to yourselves the power not only of a mind, but of a personality, of a character which can attract vast millions who have never gazed upon the human expression in the human face—can attract them to great love or to great hatred, can mold the destinies of an empire, can change the current of the time—think of such men as Richelieu or Cavour, or more modern instances, and you understand what is the greatness and the power of the attraction of political activity. ”

“ The sun shineth by day, and men go forth to their labors; but they grow weary, and nightfall cometh on, like a sweet boon from heaven. The darkness draweth the curtains, and shutteth out the light, which might prevent our eyes from slumber; while the sweet, calm stillness of the night permits us to rest upon the lap of ease, and there forget awhile our cares, until the morning sun appeareth, and an angel puts his hand upon the curtain, and undraws it once again, touches our eyelids, and bids us rise, and proceed to the labors of the day. Night is one of the greatest blessings men enjoy ”

“ But it is undoubtedly and profoundly true that you no sooner have an institution, whether in society, in politics, or in religion, than you are threatened with the danger that the institution may first exaggerate itself and then harden and stiffen into a machine; and that in the realm of religion, preeminently, those whose office it should be to quicken and infuse it with new life should themselves come at last to "worship the net and the drag." And just here you find in the history of religion in all ages the place of the prophet and the seer. ”

“ Our own awakened conscience feels the difficulty of absolution; it demands that sin shall not be lightly passed over; it wearies itself to find an availing sacrifice and atonement. "Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world!" In Him, too, we have that grace which brings us into accord with the mind and government of God. Christ reveals to us the divine ideal life; He awakens in us a passion for that life; He leads us into the power and privilege, the liberty and gladness, of that life. He fills our imagination with the vision of His own divine loveliness ”

“ But how much sadder is the form of the mighty spirit, who once sat regnant among the sons of light, emptied of his innocence, filled with foul, creeping, venomous thoughts and feelings, uncrowned, dethroned only with malignity and throned in evil! The Bible calls him the prince and the god of this world; and everywhere we are surrounded with evidences of his despotic sway. Unlike earthly rulers, whose exhausted natures exact repose, he is ever sleepless, and his plotting never ends. Enter his somber presence-chamber, and commotion, bustle, activity will confront and amaze you. ”

“ I am here as a believer in a supernatural gospel—not with philosophy that may be framed out of the human life of Jesus, but with a religion that is based upon the supernatural life of the divine Christ. And I appeal to you on this subject of missions as to a company of men who believe in the divine authority of the Book of God; who believe in a blood atonement; who believe in salvation by faith only; who believe in the pardon of sin and in the regeneration of your natures; who believe in the power of the Holy Ghost; who believe, in short, in the sum and substance of an old-fashioned orthodoxy. ”

“ Reason as we may, suppress the disagreeable truths of life as we may, suffering will find us out, and pierce us to the heart. Indeed, despite our dissimulations, we know that life is not a matter of lutes, doves, and sunflowers, and at last we have little patience with those who thus seek to represent it. We will not have the philosophy which ignores suffering; witness the popularity of Schopenhauer. We resent the art which ignores sorrow. True art has no pleasure in sin and suffering, in torture, horror, and death ”

“ Let me see that this physical life of mine, having no true character of its own, is made to be a great machinery for simply conducting the knowledge and the love of God into my life; let all my study of the exquisite adaptations of the physical organs for their work be sanctified with this idea, this ever-pervading consciousness that eye and ear and hand are doors for the knowledge and the love of Him to enter by, and that all their marvelous mechanism is only the perfecting of hinges and bolt that He may enter more impressively and lovingly and entirely ”

“ I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly," Have we not here the great fundamental distinction between men—the line that separates the evil from the good, the just from the unjust, the sheep from the goats—that distinction which Jesus marks so clearly in His parable of judgment, and which must never, in our interpretations or philosophizings, be blotted or blurred? Some are life-givers; some are life-destroyers. "The thief cometh not but that he may steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly." ”

“ It is the bold Christian who can sing God's sonnets in the darkness.
He who can sing songs in the night, too, proves that he has true love to Christ. It is not love to Christ to praise Him while everybody else praises Him; to walk arm in arm with Him when He has the crown on His head is no great deed, I wot; to walk with Christ in rags is something. To believe in Christ when He is shrouded in darkness, to stick hard and fast by the Savior when all men speak ill of Him and forsake Him—that is true faith. He who singeth a song to Christ in the night, singeth the best song in all the world ”

“ Esther "sent raiment to clothe Mordecai, and to take his sackcloth from him; but he received it not." In vain do men offer us robes of beauty, chiding us for wearing the color of the night; we cannot be deceived by flattering words; we must give place to all the sad thoughts of our mortality until haply we find a salvation that goes to the root of our suffering, that dries up the fount of our tears.
In a very different spirit and for very different ends do men contemplate the dark side of human life. ”

“ We need not think that it is physiological fact that the sky colored the eyes of the babe as the babe came through. Nor need we suppose that man was a clay image into which God breathed a physical breath, so animating him. But beyond all this imagery is the vision of the poet. God in man; a divine life throbbing in humanity; man the offspring of God; man coming forth from the eternal and going forth into the eternal. ”