Various

“ The divine perfections are to be displayed through future ages. And now, if we look out upon the surging billows of the ocean, our mind swells with the thought that God is there in all his majesty. With our thoughts confined to our earth we pass from age to age tracing the divine power from the laws of motion to chemical action and crystallization, until we behold a wonderful change upon the face of nature. ”

“ Say what we may of fear, it is nevertheless true that we are greatly influenced by fear. We are greatly indebted to the fear of sickness for health, to the fear of poverty for wealth, and to the fear of death for life. Fear is to caution what knowledge is to a wise choice. Where there is no fear there is no caution. The love of life and bliss is natural, therefore we fear sickness, poverty and death. Why say with your lips, "I am above fear," while away down in your heart you know it to be a lie?
Love and fear, like the Siamese twins, live and perish together. Do we not need "revelation?" ”

“ Is it possible that life and death walk "arm-in-arm?" Yes; even while we are happy in the enjoyment of one, the other comes and casts the fearful mantle over all our earthly prospects. Seal up this blessed volume of life, and I know not from whence the light is to spring which would cheer this gloomy picture. Without this, man would be in a grade of blessedness beneath the brutes that perish. It would be better to be anything than rational without the religion of Jesus Christ and the intelligence of the Bible. ”

“ Benevolent habits are a great source of happiness, for which we are indebted to the religion of Christ.
It is vain to attempt to persuade ourselves that human misery does not exist. We can not get away from it by arming ourselves with stoical insensibility. Evils lie all about us; we ourselves are made to feel them. If we open our eyes upon the pages of time we see a continuous series of beings who appear for a short time and then pass away. Their beds are bedewed with tears, and soon the emblems of death are hung about their doors. ”

“ Are we under no obligations to the man who first informed us of vaccination as a preventive of small-pox, simply because it would always have prevented it? Are we under no obligations to men on account of scientific discoveries, just because the truths discovered are eternal truths? Nonsense! You know it is nonsense. Then we may be under lasting obligations to the Christ for the revelation of the Gospel, with its sublime precepts and principles, consolations and promises, which fill up the human spirit with undying love and the hope of eternal glory. ”

“ A man alienated from his God is without his proper relations, and separated from the fountain of happiness, is like a child unconscious of his father—an orphan, forced along, the sport of accident, with no hope for the future, but darkness that may overshadow his pathway to the tomb. ”

“ THE FOUNTAIN OF HAPPINESS.
The source and fullness of created good is the knowledge and enjoyment of God. "Give what thou wilt, without thee we are poor; and with thee rich, take what thou wilt away." The wicked are like a ship's crew at sea, carried by the winds upon unknown waters, without peace or safety until they can renew communications with the shore. ”

“ Shall we search for them in nature? Can reason alone discover them? Are they found in the teachings of philosophy? Are they gathered from observation? Does not our world need Revelation to make known the true aim and end of our being?" Cicero said, "Those who do not agree in stating what is the chief end, or good, must of course differ in the whole system of precepts for the conduct of human life." ”

“ Substance is properly divided into matter and spirit, or that which is extended and that which thinks.
"The foundation principle of substance is that law of the human mind by which every quality or mode of being is referred to a substance," or the consciousness of a cause for every effect. "In everything which we perceive or can imagine as existing, we distinguish two parts, qualities variable and multiplied; and a being one and identical; and these two are so united in thought that we can not separate them in our intelligence, nor think of qualities without a substance." ”

“ If we were at once deprived of all knowledge of God where would we find hopes for support in the gloomy hours of adversity? What sadness would reign over the world! What black despair! O, what a chasm it would make to strike the Infinite One out of existence! "The angels might retire in silence and weep, or fly through infinite space seeking some token of the Father they had lost. ”

“ The Bible's happiest soul is he who has most of its peculiar mind and character. Not on account of earthly riches, for he may be one of the Lord's poor, who, like his blessed Master, has "no place to lay his head." Not because he has sought and obtained honor from men, but because he sought and "seeks the honor which cometh from God only." Not because he has much of this world, but because he is a Christian. He may not have the greatest capacity, but he has a state of mind that prepares him to rightly estimate and enjoy all that is worth enjoying. ”

“ Pantheism is veiled Atheism. It is not necessary to argue this proposition at length. Pantheists often speak of the great being, which, according to Pantheism, is composed of all the intelligences of the universe. Can any man conceive of such a being? Can intelligences be piled one upon another, like brick and mortar, and thus be compounded? And if my spirit be the highest intelligence in the universe, did it create itself? ”

“ SUBSTANCE OR SUBSTANCES—WHICH? OR, THE ORIGIN OF LIFE AND MIND.
"Substance is that which is and abides;" "that which subsists of or by itself; that which lies under qualities; that which truly is—or essence." "It is opposed to accident." "In its logical and metaphysical sense it is that nature of a thing which may be conceived to remain when every other nature is removed or abstracted from it; the ultimate point in analyzing the complex idea of any object. Accident denotes all those ideas which the analysis excludes as not belonging to the mere being or nature of the object." ”

“ To the ear of faith there is a voice. It is the voice of our God. We listen. The words come ringing in our hearts, "For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him." ”

“ Death is constantly destroying his fondest hopes and causing him the sorest grief. It bursts the ties that bind heart to heart, and the dearest fellowships are severed, and the joys of a blessed life are wrapped in the gloom of death. ”

“ Great efforts from great motives are the glory and blessedness of our nature. In the Bible only men have learned what great motives and efforts are. There we find food to sustain them and wisdom to guide them. Nowhere in the pages of infidel philosophy can we find such an injunction as this: "Whether, therefore, ye eat or drink, do all to the glory of God." Where else do we find this Christian maxim: "None of us liveth to himself, and none of us dieth to himself; but whether we live, we live unto the Lord, and whether we die, we die unto the Lord." ”

“ Let none of us live at a distance from our God. Let none of us approach death without the necessary preparation for mutual association with him. Let none of us bear the burden of a guilty conscience in that hour. May none of us be so cruel as to leave the hearts that love us in doubt respecting our condition in death. ”

“ There are peoples in the world decently clad, well fed, and living in comfortable mansions, with well tilled lands, who make powerful streams turn powerful wheels and run great machinery; who yoke the iron horse to the market train and drive their floating palaces against the floods; who erect churches in every village, and make their children more learned than the priests of Egypt, or the philosophers of Greece; even many of their criminals are more decent and upright than were the sages, philosophers and heroes of lands destitute of the Bible. ”

“ We often submit to present pain when counseled to do so by those in whose wisdom and goodness we trust. As Christians we extend this principle to all the sufferings of this life. Doing so, we have that feeling of quiet submission growing out of permanent confidence in God which supports us under all the trials to which we have been subjected by an all-wise Father. This principle is wonderfully fruitful in consolations to the bereaved and mourning—it is the joy of all Christian hearts. "The Lord reigneth, let the earth rejoice." ”

“ With unbounded grief and despair they might wing their way farther and farther, with their harps all unstrung, and every song silent, and the soul-harrowing words, 'We have no Father, no God, a blind chance rules,' might be all that would break the awful silence of heaven. ”

“ The great Pantheistic divinity is spoken of by Pantheists as the great soul of the universe, while the more materialistic look upon it as the universe itself, body and soul. With them the soul is the fountain of all the imponderable forces, vegetable and animal life, the mesmeric influences, galvanism, magnetism, electricity, light and heat; and the body the sum of all the ponderable substances; in one word, "God is everything, and everything is God." This system is called "Monotheistic Pantheism." ”

“ What benefit would accrue to the human family from an effort upon our part to bring to the foreground all the blunders made in scientific researches which are to-day numbered with the old effete errors in religion? And where is the propriety of infidels making a set of asses of themselves by playing upon the little irregularities of language and character in religion, as they themselves allow no man to do in science and morality. ”

“ Does the God who loves us sympathize with us in our woes? We are liable at every step in life to great individual and domestic calamities. No hour can be free from the fear that what we value the most on the earth may be snatched away to-morrow.
Trees and flowers grow to their full stature, fill up their measure of time, and pass away. Beasts and birds are more rarely cut off with disease. Their lives are not embittered with the expectation of death; the knowledge of the past and the present is all they have ”

“ The antidote for all these ills culminating in death was the tree of life. When man sinned against his God he was put away from the tree of life. If he had remained with it he would have been beyond the reach of the motive of life, and beyond the restraining power of the fear of death. ”

“ What shall we say of the hopes and prospects of bereaved souls? Is it blind conjecture that there is an existence beyond the shadows? Is there no life to come? No great resurrection? No comforter to arrest the current of mourning and lamentation? ”

“ The idea of "one substance" only is a very great error, which grew out of an abuse of language in confounding the two words, matter and substance. The latter word is equally applicable to matter, or spirit, but the former always contrasts with spirit; so to confound the two is to ignore a distinction upon which everything depends in any, except the materialistic, philosophy. When the term substance is used in the currency of the term matter it admits of the plural form as well as the singular. Indeed, all the primordial elements known in chemistry are known as so many different substances. ”

“ Has each planet a great "soul of the world," as well as our earth? If so, had we not as well build an altar to each planet and go back to the religion of our banana-fed ancestors, who burned their children alive in sun worship?
The Christian religion is so fearfully demoralizing (?) that it is a great pity that these Godless, Christless souls called Pantheists and Atheists can't get some solution of the great problem of world-making that would dispense with the Bible. ”

“ Let them cease to profane religion and offend common sense by giving the name of the glorious Father of Spirits to their million-headed nondescript. Pantheism dethrones Jehovah and places no other intelligence in his place as Creator and Ruler of the universe; and, being conscious of the odium that necessarily attaches itself to Atheism, on account of its everlasting foolishness, they steal the name of God to cloak their Atheism. ”

“ They say they can accept the Bible—that is their phrase—notwithstanding it pronounces death upon the fools who, "professing to be wise, change the truth of God into a [Pg 271] lie, and worship and serve the creature more than the Creator," as a mystic revelation of the Pantheism which leaves us to "erect everything into a God," provided it is none, inasmuch as "every product of the human mind is a development of Deity." So the Bible, in the conclusion of their system, is on a level with Thomas Paine's writings as respects inspiration and origin. ”

“ In the midst of seminal pleasures and corrupt passions men are always miserable. The influence of the Gospel of Christ is the only remedy for such diseases. It saves men from aggravating selfishness and holds in check their fierce passions until they are extinguished. Virtuous affections are invariably the great sources of human happiness. They are fountains of living waters, which purify the mind and make their possessors happy. They are as rivers of water in a thirsty land.
In the teachings of Christ we learn all that pertains to true happiness, in what it consists and how to obtain it. ”

“ But the wiser ones have reached the perfection of Jesuitism, that is to say, they indulge in hypocrisy and deception to effect a purpose. They grant that the Christian religion is the highest development of humanity yet attained by a majority of the race. The heathen of every grade of character, and the Christian, with all others who may not be classified by us with either, are all, in their scheme, so many successive developments of humanity. It is a trick of their trade to clothe their abominations in Bible language by wresting the Scriptures. ”

“ Curiosity was aroused and observations multiplied, errors corrected and the untenable removed, until the science now stands before us with its bases settled in unquestionable facts. Let us all learn from this circumstance the bearings of the times in which we live, for a double process of elimination is now going on under the providence of God, by means of which both Christianity and science will have more beauty and strength of manhood to command the respect of our children. ”

“ These are all so many evidences of an internal substance that we call spirit. That spirit is to be distinguished from thought as cause is from effect is evident; and also from matter lying in the accident or quality of body, is certain, from the fact of its being subject to such rapid and instantaneous changes of condition. Amidst all the different modes, qualities, or accidents of mind, we believe ourselves to be the same individual being; and this conviction is the result of that law of thought which always associates qualities with things. ”