Various

“ The charts lie spread before him. Island, continent, lone sea-rock, hidden shoal, they are all mapped to his eye. The faithful needle points due north. The true sun rises where he always has. The faithful, changeless stars look down at midnight. The truth saves him, rocked in the arms of the wild sea. The reality holds him secure. Ask him, looking out, in the night watch, over the black sea and up to the inky deeps, and down to the dim-lighted compass before him, ask him his opinion of a lie! ”

“ The truth is, Mohammed's great lie was founded on, and propagated with, an equally great truth, a truth amply sufficient to carry it. In the midst of abominable idolatry, of stupid polytheism, Mohammed proclaimed: 'There is no God but God!' His wild and foolish fictions were based on that grand, unalterable truth. That truth is big enough to bear up more lies than even he ventured to cover it with. The human heart leaped up to grasp the great fact that props the Universe—'GOD IS!'—and, in its love for that, accepted also the falsehoods woven into its proclamation. ”

“ The wise way is to let truth fight her own battles. She will render a good account of all her foes. Our humble duty is to stand by her, merely as seconds in the strife, to help her to her feet should she fall, to burnish her armor if the rust come to dim its brightness or spoil the keenness of her weapon's edge, knowing that she, as with the sword of the cherubim, will scatter, at the last, the evil legions and their dark array, as the whirlwind scatters the chaff. ”

“ I was ready to think meanly of my kind, to distrust humanity's instincts for truth. The lookout was on despair. But, when I understood the nature of the lie, I learned to think better of my brethren, I learned to have more hope in their Maker. No, there is no building on nothing. Every lie has a substratum of truth. In fact, look closer, and is not a lie only a distorted truth?—a truth torn from its connections, its features twisted out of all symmetry, its outlines battered out of all shape? ”

“ But apart from its truth or falsity, in whole or in part, regarded simply as an intellection, it strikes us as one of the grandest of modern times. Spreading itself over almost illimitable space, grasping back through almost illimitable time, claiming for itself the boundless multiplicity of type, and form, and life, and law of the organic world, and unfolding to the wondering gaze the vast prophetic possibilities of the future, it possesses all the attributes of grandeur, magnificence, sublimity, and mystery. If it is a phantasm, it is more gorgeous than the most splendid creations of poetry. ”

“ In all the universe the evil roots itself into the good. Evil never has an independent life. Like an idol, 'it is nothing in the world.' An evil nature is a good nature, only turned from its aim. Death exists only because there is life. Disease feeds on rosy health. Devils are, by nature, angels. The foulest fiend is only the loftiest seraph spoiled. The evil is always a parasite. All things were made 'very good.' An evil thing is only one of those good things corrupted. The lie, therefore, grows out of the truth. ”

“ Because a lie is a respectable lie, believed and patronized by respectable people, shall you respect it? Because some venerable sham has imposed its emptiness on a score of generations, shall we go on reverencing it, and pass the scarecrow and its trumpery trappings on for the reverence of our children? Shall we, for any cause, that is, turn liars ourselves, and use the tongues God gave us to speak honest truth and simple meaning with, to deceive, in small matter or great, one human brother of ours, and make him think Satan's black lie as good as the Lord's white truth? ”

“ A great universe whirls away with its ebon-faced mysteries piled from central caves to highest heavens—a universe, with all its mysteries, of hardest reality and baldest truth. A man, looking up to the cold, clear, unswerving stars, out yonder in the wintry night, or down at the grave that lies, somewhere, for the digging across his path, must feel that a lie for him, knowing his place, knowing himself, that a lie for him is accursed. ”

“ He wants to get others to see it. He brings his logic artillery and the rifle brigades of his flashing rhetoric to the battle. But, let him not be surprised if his heavy shot is powdered, and his Minié bullets glance harmless, as from a Monitor's turret, for beneath lies the iron truth that 'God is God,' and that saves the lie that 'Mohammed is His prophet.' He is not to rush, like a madman, at the lie, and try to maul it to death by sheer force of arm and hand. There is a hard truth beneath it, and he will only lame his knuckles. ”

“ Here comes in the American principle of Competition, the keynote of all our enterprise. Competition is to do for us what the hope of earthly immortality did for the builders of the Pyramids, what the desire to glorify God did for the builders of the cathedrals. It is to be the soul of our art: what sort of a body it is to put on, we shall presently see. Even now it is safe to assume that no more such granite prisons as the 'Revere' or the 'Astor' will be built for hotels. Lightness, variety, and vivacity will more probably characterize this style. ”

“ But all these together, smitten as they were with the palsy of voluptuousness and oppression, had not the power to bring forth one great name, to achieve one heroic deed, or on the other hand, to foster any growth of humble, diffused happiness. Her sin, plated with gold, dazzled the eyes and confounded the consciences of men, but, like the ornaments of a sepulchre, it only beautified outwardly what within was full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.
Those events of her history which bear on the abolition of slavery will be specially noticed hereafter. ”

“ Conceding, as we must, the supremacy of facts in their own sphere, and granting that, as mundane and human affairs now stand, the evidence of the senses, purged from fraud and illusion, must be held to be conclusive, we cheerfully award to scientific men the largest liberty to pursue their inquiries in matters of fact, utterly regardless of the havoc which may be thereby wrought among the traditional, beliefs of men. In no other way can science be true to herself. ”

“ How much simpler to show what is the truth than, laboriously, to expose the claims of a thousand pretenders that are not it! Here are five hundred John Smiths. They each pretend to be our John, the man we know and esteem so highly. I could set to work with infinite labor, and, by having commissions appointed all over the world to take evidence, and by employing a hundred or so of my friends the lawyers, I might, after a lifetime of investigation, prove the negative, that four hundred and ninety-nine of them are not John. ”

“ At this transition state, through which Venice passed so nobly, have we now arrived. We have collected our materials, and piled them up together, but just as all seems most propitious, le mouvement s'arrête, the materials will not coalesce. The brass and the silver, the iron and the gold, are all in the crucible, but there is no fusion, only a discordant clash.
Alas! there is no heat. We are not warmed, as yet, with any love for art. We are too much absorbed in the rapid accumulation of wealth, or the passing excitement of the hour, to attend to anything that is noble or honest or beautiful. ”

“ We are a social people, it is true, but our individualities are strongly marked, and our dwellings, while designed with reference to each other, should never be too uniform. How frightful those white-shuttered brick piles which monotonize the streets of Philadelphia! But to assert its individuality the house need not shoot up like a vein of trap rock through a stratum of conglomerate: an American rises, not through the mass, but out of it.
Have you ever seen a street view of Bruges or Nuremberg, those fantastic old cities of mediæval Germany? ”

“ But as government, of whatever kind, follows the laws of the human mind, is first a germ, then a growth, and then a fruitage—shoot, blade, and ear—our Government can only realize this greatness and perfection (unlimited intelligence and virtue) in its matured or organic state; when the declared principles of its form shall have become livingly combined or organized in institutions of unlimited excellence and power—institutions that will perpetually embody and express the exalted human force that inspired them. ”

“ And it must be at once perceived that any such treatment of science, any such half-concealed fear of the progress of science, any such unfair and spiteful bearing toward scientific men, argues a secret distrust of the system or doctrine which is assumed to be held and professedly defended. These petulant and much disturbed editors and divines must be really afraid that the ground is being undermined beneath their feet. If a man really believes the inspiration and infallibility of the Scriptures, he may feel perfectly at ease as to any facts present or past in the wide universe. ”

“ Enslaved as I was, I of course complied; and then underwent a humiliation that, even in my horrified state, was very bitter. I had always, in my most puritanical days, kicked at the doctrine that we are all such abominable, hell-deserving, self-degraded creatures, responsible for our own ruin, that it is the wonder of creation that God would give our souls any least chance of heaven. I had always felt with Tennyson:
'Thou wilt not leave us in the dust;
Thou madest man, and Thou art just.' ”

“ They offer clear springs, fresh fruits, and festal flowers, peace and rest and pure joy!'
'Really, Lucy,' said Aunt Sarah, 'I am not sure your rhapsody has made the mystery any plainer than before. May I not, in my turn, ask if your feelings are quite Christian? Are you not afraid you entertain a species of repulsion toward your fellow men?'
'Aunt Sarah, I nearly always feel more for them than they for me. Perhaps they hurt my vanity by overwhelming me with the sense of my own insignificance. Be that as it may, their everlasting wrangling among themselves is more than I can endure. ”

“ And never yet did that opposition come from those who loved the lie for the lie's sake or the bad for the bad's sake. It came from those who love Truth, but who could not trust her, who loved Good, but had no faith in its success, who wanted to see the right side triumph, but had no confidence in the right—who really believed, that is to say, that Satan was almighty and the Lord's cause could not prosper, in this world at least, without his help! The opposition came from those who would deal gently with respectable lies, not because they are lies, but because they are respectable ”

“ Now, do not misunderstand me, Uncle Paul; when I say that marriage is a valley of humiliation, I intend no reproach to men; I simply state a fact dependent upon the nature of things, and upon the primal sentence passed against the pride that, in spite of the prohibition of the Almighty, sought to know all things, 'to become as gods.' Meekness, humility, self-abnegation, affection, are the beautiful flowers that grow by the wayside; but the pathway is not the less thorny, and no good can be accomplished by denying or sugar-coating the fact. ”

“ We have seldom been more impressed by the grandeur of mechanical operations than on a recent night visit to one of the large rolling mills of Scranton. The whole interior, vast as a cathedral, was brilliantly lighted by the numerous operations in molten and red-hot iron that were everywhere in progress, and, with its gleaming furnaces, ranged on either hand down the long vista, and glowing here and there from the galleries, really made us feel prouder of our race than did many a dim, dilapidated temple of the Old World. ”

“ Truths will always be half told, half learned, half understood. The man who girds himself to do battle with falsehood and wrong should understand that 'there is no discharge in this war.' It will last his life out. He must accept the inevitable condition of his place, and must be content to do his best, hopefully and bravely, in this world-work, though he surely know that it shall be said of him, as of those faithful ones who saw only in vision the coming Christ: 'These all died in hope, not having obtained the promise.' I have attempted here some hints for the truth-lover. ”

“ The island society, unrelieved by any eminence of genius or virtue, or by the stir of great public interests, presented little more than a dull monotony of sensuality and indolence, on a ground of inhumanity. It is no wonder that Zachary Macaulay, from his experience in Jamaica as the superintendent of an estate, formed in quiet sternness that resolution to devote his life to uprooting a social system whose presiding divinities he saw to be Mammon and Moloch, which he afterward so nobly fulfilled. ”

“ A rich level meadow with here and there a waving elm requires a different style of house from a fir-clad bluff on a river bank or a wild gorge in a mountain. No intelligent architect, we take it, would design a country house without an intimate acquaintance with the surroundings, and yet the same man, likely as not, would make you a sketch for the elevation of your house in town, without even looking to see what it was to adjoin on either side. ”

“ But in that period of English history which beheld a suspension of specie payment protracted twenty years, an enormous expansion of the currency—the appreciation of gold—a rise in prices unparalleled in any country—a wild spirit of speculation—and, with all, an appearance of astonishing prosperity in the midst of a most exhausting war, we see the reflection of our own condition, and find the lessons by which we should be governed. We have now, for the first time, become a people conscious of taxation. ”

“ How could a man preach truth, framed in such a staring lie? I have no doubt he tried to, for, I believe, he is an excellent man; but what a place to put him, Sunday after Sunday, with that painted cheat behind him, mocking all he says!
But lies are venerable as well as respectable. There are old, gray lies that men half worship. The more toothless and drivelling, often the more venerable. They have imposed their solemn emptiness on men for generations. They have awed the souls of the fathers. They make the children tremble. ”

“ That my own marriage has been a happy one, and that my good husband has striven, by recognizing my womanly as well as individual idiosyncrasies, to render the yoke as light as it possibly can be, is the very circumstance that gives me a right to speak and offer my testimony against ideas which I think wholly unwarranted by the facts in the case. The views of modern philosophers, attacking the sanctity of Christian marriage, are to me perfectly abhorrent. Deprive marriage of its mystical, sacramental, penitential character, and it ceases to be the bulwark of a well-ordered society. ”

“ It is discouraging, at first thought, to reflect that no such magnificent architectural combinations as those of the French capital can ever find place in an American city. They are grand, they are superb, these endless successions of palaces and gardens and triumphal arches, with groves and fountains all in perfect symmetry, and well-balanced vistas radiating in all directions; but they are the result of centuries of despotism—of the impoverishment of the many and the aggrandizement of the few. ”