Quotes from beecher henry ward ix

Laws are not masters but servants, and he rules them who obeys them.

Make men large and strong, and tyranny will bankrupt itself in making shackles for them.

There is not on earth so base a knave as the man who wins the love of a woman when he knows that he cannot or ought not to requite it.

Truth is the bread of a noble manhood.

Men might spin, and churn, and knit, and sew, and cook, and rock the cradel for a hundred generations, and not be women. And woman will not become man by external occupations. God's colors do not wash out: sex is dyed in the wool.

Indifference in religion is more fatal than skepticism. There is no pulse in indifference; skepticism may have warm blood.

A man's soul ought to be as the heavens were on the night when the shepherds looked up, and saw them full of angels as well as stars.

In friendship your heart is like a bell struck every time your friend is in trouble.

Like the emery and sand with which we scour off rude surfaces, evil and trouble in this world are but instruments. And they are in the hands of God.

The call to religion is not a call to be better than your fellows, but to be better than yourself. Religion is relative to the individual.

Earthly love is a brief and penurious stream, which only flows in spring, with a long summer drought. The change from a burning desert, treeless, springless, drear, to green fields and blooming orchards in June, is slight in comparison with that from the desert of this world's affection to the garden of God, where there is perpetual, tropical luxuriance of blessed love.

There are some Christians whose secular life is an arid, worldly strife, and whose religion is but a turbid sentimentalism. Their life runs along that line where the overflow of the Nile meets the desert. It is the boundary line between sand and mud.

Let every man come to God in his own way.

Men do not avail themselves of the riches of God's grace. They love to nurse their cares, and seem as uneasy without some fret, as an old friar would be without his hair girdle. They are commanded to cast their cares upon the Lord; but, even when they attempt it, they do not fail to catch them up again, and think it meritorious to walk burdened. They take God's ticket to heaven, and then put their baggage on their shoulders, and tramp, tramp, the whole way there afoot.

God is himself a vast medicine for man. It is the heart of God that carries restoration, inspiration, aspiration, and final victory.

Some plants of the bitterest root have the whitest and sweetest blossoms; so the bitterest wrong has the sweetest repentance.

Wherever you have seen God pass, mark that spot, and go and sit in that window again.