Quotes from beecher henry ward xvi

We have the promises of God as thick as daisies in summer meadows, that death, which men most fear, shall be to us the most blessed of experiences, if we trust in him. Death is unclasping; joy, breaking out in the desert; the heart, come to its blossoming time! Do we call it dying when the bud bursts into flower?

If any man is rich and powerful, he comes under that law of God by which the higher branches must take the burnings of the sun, and shade those that are lower; by which the tall trees must protect the weak plants beneath them.

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. If you are angry with a man, or hate him, it is not hard to go to him and stab him with words; but so to love a man that you cannot bear to see the stain of sin upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words--that is friendship. But few have such friends. Our enemies usually teach us what we are, at the point of the sword.

It is not when the cable lies coiled up on the deck that you know how strong or how weak it is; it is when it is put to the test.

Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin.

That endless book, the newspaper, is our national glory.

Poverty is never by the grace of God in the estimation of a New-Englander. It comes to him by post from the other direction.

In the family, happiness is in the ratio in which each is serving the others, seeking one another's good, and bearing one another's burdens.

Men never _make_ truths; they only recognize the value of this currency of God. They find truths, as men sometimes find bills, in the street, and only recognize the value of that which other persons have drawn.

Religion is only another word for the right use of a man's whole self, instead of a wrong use of himself.

The church is no more religion than the masonry of the aqueduct is the water that flows through it.

Take from the Bible the Godship of Christ, and it would be but a heap of dust.

Men judge of Christians by taking as fair samples those that lie rotten on the ground.

The religion of Jesus Christ is not ascetic, nor sour, nor gloomy, nor circumscribing. It is full of sweetness in the present and in promise.

Christians are like vases, they must pass through the fire ere they can shine. The graces which are to be their everlasting beauty and glory must be burned in.

God puts the excess of hope in one man, in order that it may be a medicine to the man who is despondent.

No grief has a right to immortality. That ground belongs to joy, to hope, to faith.

Worry is rust upon the blade.

Christians! It is your duty not only to be good, but to shine; and, of all the lights which you kindle on the face, Joy will reach farthest out to sea, where troubled mariners are seeking the shore.

Truths are first clouds, then rain, then harvests and food.