Clergy from the United States

"At the same time, I must personally say that I do question the sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left wing associations."

"The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country. If [there is] any place in the world we need Christianity, it's in Washington. And that's why preachers long since need to get over that intimidation forced upon us by liberals, that if we mention anything about politics, we are degrading our ministry."

"[S]o-called gay folks would just as soon kill you as look at you."

"I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!"

"If one removes the first two letters from this word "spoil" he soon realizes what Russia will really be after — obviously, oil."

"The Jews are returning to their land of unbelief. They are spiritually blind and desperately in need of their Messiah and Savior."

"The homosexuals are on the march in this country. Please remember, homosexuals do not reproduce! They recruit! And, many of them are after my children and your children."

"You'll be riding along in an automobile. You'll be the driver perhaps. You're a Christian. There'll be several people in the automobile with you, maybe someone who is not a Christian. When the trumpet sounds you and the other born-again believers in that automobile will be instantly caught away - you will disappear, leaving behind only your clothes and physical things that cannot inherit eternal life. That unsaved person or persons in the automobile will suddenly be startled to find the car suddenly somewhere crashes... Other cars on the highway driven by believers will suddenly be out of control and stark pandemonium will occur on … every highway in the world where Christians are caught away from the drivers wheel."

"AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharaoh's charioteers. AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals. It is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals."

"Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them."

"If the American Atheists Society or Saddam Hussein himself ever sent an unrestricted gift to any of my ministries, be assured I will operate on Billy Sunday's philosophy: The Devil's had it long enough, and quickly cash the check."

"He [Tinky Winky] is purple—the gay-pride color, and his antenna is shaped like a triangle—the gay pride symbol."

"God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve."

"The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this."

"Pat, did you notice yesterday the ACLU, and all the Christ-haters, People For the American Way, NOW, etc. were totally disregarded by the Democrats and the Republicans in both houses of Congress as they went out on the steps and called out on to God in prayer and sang "God Bless America" and said "let the ACLU be hanged"? In other words, when the nation is on its knees, the only normal and natural and spiritual thing to do is what we ought to be doing all the time — calling upon God."

"And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen.""

"The true Negro does not want integration ... He realizes his potential is far better among his own race ... It will destroy our race eventually ... In one northern city, a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife ... It boils down to whether we are going to take God's Word as final."

"I think Muhammad was a terrorist. I read enough by both Muslims and non-Muslims, [to decide] that he was a violent man, a man of war."

"This is probably as bad a day as the court has had on social issues since '."

"You've got to kill the terrorists before the killing stops and I am for the President—chase them all over the world, if it takes ten years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord."

"And the fact that John Kerry would not support a federal marriage amendment [prohibiting gay marriage], it equates in our minds as someone 150 years ago saying I'm personally opposed to slavery, but if my neighbor wants to own one or two that's OK. We don't buy that."

"The fact that Marc Cherry's a gay Republican means he should join the Democratic Party."

"Civil rights for all Americans, black, white, red, yellow, the rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, et cetera, is not a liberal or a conservative value. It’s an American value that I would think that we pretty much all agree on."

"Regardless of the response from the Jewish person, we remain friends in support of the State of Israel as required by scripture."

"I have been on record all 54 years of my ministry as being opposed to dual covenant theology... I simply cannot alter my deeply held belief in the exclusivity of salvation through the Gospel of Christ for the sake of political or theological expediency. Like the Apostle Paul, I pray daily for the salvation of everyone, including the Jewish people."

"Today the world has gone sex crazy. Illicit sex has become the downfall of many in the Bible. Movie stars not married to each other, having babies and making headlines all over the world as though they were doing some great thing. Big deal! Just another moral pervert. And for them to become heroes for our kids. My wife and I will be married 49 years the next anniversary."

"You know, you almost got to be a homosexual to be recognized in the entertainment industry anymore. Ellen [Degeneres], and all the rest. I love them, pray for their souls, but they're immoral. And the Hollywood scene — five and eight and 10 marriages — not something to be emulated."

"Thank God for these gay demonstrators. If I didn't have them, I'd have to invent them. They give me all the publicity I need."

"Since Jesus came to the earth the first time 2,000 years ago as a Jewish male, many evangelicals believe the Antichrist will, by necessity, be a Jewish male. This belief is 2,000 years old and has no anti-Semitic roots. This is simply historic and prophetic orthodox Christian doctrine that many theologians, Christian and non-Christian, have understood for two millennia."

"I believe in the premillenial, pre-tribulational coming of Christ for all of his church, and to summarize that, your first poll, do you believe Jesus coming the second time will be in the future, I would vote yes with the 59 percent and with Billy Graham and most evangelicals. The second question, you asked, "Do you think he is coming in your lifetime?" I would vote neither yes nor no. I would vote I do not know, because Jesus said, "No man knows the day or the hour." So the bottom line is, I believe that we ought to be living every day as though this is the crowning day. But we should also be planning and working with the next generation in mind, because we do not know."

"So what’s to be done right now? The social dominators and high RWAs presently marshaling their forces for the next election in your county, state and country, are perfectly entitled to do what they’re doing. They have the right to organize, they have the right to proselytize, they have the right to select and work for candidates they like, they have the right to vote, they have the right to make sure folks who agree with them also vote. Jerry Falwell has already declared, "We absolutely are going to deliver this nation back to God in 2008!" If the people who are not social dominators and right-wing authoritarians want to have those same rights in the future, they, you, had better do those same things too, now. You do have the right to remain silent, but you’ll do so at everyone’s peril. You can't sit these elections out and say "Politics is dirty; I’ll not be part of it,” or “Nothing can change the way things are done now." The social dominators want you to be disgusted with politics, they want you to feel hopeless, they want you out of their way. They want democracy to fail, they want your freedoms stricken, they want equality destroyed as a value, they want to control everything and everybody, they want it all. And they have an army of authoritarian followers marching with the militancy of “that old-time religion” on a crusade that will make it happen, if you let them. Research shows most people are not in this army. However Americans have, for the most part, been standing on the sidewalk quietly staring at this authoritarian parade as it marches on."

"For Falwell and the religious right, the tension between adhering to a literal interpretation of the Bible and allowing the compromise inherent in mainstream politics never fully eased. In a pluralistic democracy, the voice of every participant has a priori equal standing. Yet with its insistence on the inerrancy of the Bible in public policy, the religious right raised the specter of theocracy. To deal with the competing demands--theological and political--Falwell, like Pat Robertson later in the 1980s, simply opted to adopt two contradictory positions, one intended for his core audience and one suited for public consumption, and hoped no one would notice. After backing Briggs's and Bryant's campaign to ban gays and lesbians from teaching positions in the public schools and repeatedly in sermons and fund-raising letters harping on the homosexual threat to children, Falwell told the Washington Post, "I have no objection to a homosexual teaching in the classroom as long as that homosexual is not flaunting his lifestyle or soliciting students.""

"Falwell generally escaped censure for such blatant contradictions because the press was often reluctant to take him to task. When his statements and motives were called into question, he has adhered to the premise that the best defense is a good offense. Instead of answering the substance of charges, Falwell would simply suggest darkly that his critics were part of a liberal conspiracy to repress the role of Christians in government. Responding to attacks on his political views in a 1976 sermon, Falwell said, "The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country.""

"While the outbreak of the mysterious and deadly disease in the early 1980s spurred many religiously motivated caregivers to new heights of compassion, Falwell used it to craft new fundraising appeals. In AIDS, religious conservatives like Falwell found the punitive manifestation for homosexual behavior for which they had been searching. No longer, they reasoned, could homosexuals pretend that homosexuality was without consequences. AIDS and homosexuality would become virtually synonymous in the rhetoric of the religious right and in the nation's consciousness. Ignoring the inconvenient facts that many people with AIDS are not gay, that the vast majority of gay men would never contract HIV, and that lesbians are at extremely low risk, Falwell and his colleagues on the right played AIDS as divine retribution for sodomy. In a 1987 fund-raising letter, for instance, Falwell accused gay men of donating blood because "they know they are going to die--and they are going to take as many people with them as they can.""

"At its apex in 1979, Falwell's Old-Time Gospel Hour raised $37 million on 2.5 million appeals, a sum unimaginable for a gay organization. Yet throughout the 19705, the show was in and out of receivership. The pressure of mounting debt drove Falwell, whose penchant for overspending was as great as his gift for overstatement, to rely ever more heavily on solicitations stressing the alleged gay threat to American families. As Falwell's financial problems forced him to retreat from the public stage, the religious right's baton passed to the biblical reconstructionist Pat Robertson. Though he owed much to Falwell's trailblazing evangelism, Robertson, who practiced faith healing and speaking in tongues, would soon eclipse him as an entrepreneur and political preacher. Vowing not to repeat Falwell's mistakes, Robertson allowed the Christian Broadcasting Network to grow at a slow but steady rate. Until 1984, when he changed his party registration from Democratic to Republican, he largely abstained from Falwell's vituperative style of political activism."

"I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass."

"The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you’ll just get yourself called Reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God’s punishment if they hadn’t got some kind of clerical qualification. People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup."

"If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox."

"I recognize and celebrate that our country is founded upon Judeo-Christian values, and I have pledged my life to defend America and all her values, the values that have made us the noblest experiment in history. But public — but political intolerance by any political party is neither a Judeo-Christian nor an American value. … The political tactics of division and slander are not our values. They are corrupting influences on religion and politics, and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our country. Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right."

"On Tuesday, May 14, the old fat false prophet Jerry Falwell died and entered hell. As the old preacher used to put it, he split hell wide open... Hell from beneath was moved to meet Falwell at his coming, rousing the dead, even those that used to be big-shots on Earth, now in hell, greeting him with such words as these: 'Why, hello, Reverend Fraudwell, you old money-grubbing pervert!' ... As a young preacher in Springfield, Missouri, Falwell was a true Calvinistic Baptist preacher who believed and preached the truth. But he saw early on that his lust for power and lucre could never be satisfied if he was faithful to the word of God. And so the old fool, like the false prophet Balaam, sold his soul for a mess of free will-ism, God loves everybody-ism, Arminianism, lies -- sold his soul for lies.""

"While liberals appeared to be safely in power, feminists could perhaps afford the luxury of defining Larry Flynt or Roman Polanski as Enemy Number One. Now that we have to cope with Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms, a rethinking of priorities seems in order."

"No matter what happens to you, no matter who flatters you or who abuses you, never look at another flag, never let a night pass but you pray God to bless that flag. Remember, boy, that behind all these men you have to do with, behind officers, and government, and people even, there is the Country Herself, your Country, and that you belong to Her as you belong to your own mother. Stand by Her, boy, as you would stand by your mother, if those devils there had got hold of her to-day."

"He loved his country as no other man has loved her; but no man deserved less at her hands."

"Can it be possible that all human sympathies can thrive, and all human powers be exercised, and all human joys increase, if we live with all our might with the thirty or forty people next to us, telegraphing kindly to all other people, to be sure? Can it be possible that our passion for large cities, and large parties, and large theatres, and large churches, develops no faith nor hope nor love which would not find aliment and exercise in a little "world of our own"?"

"The church itself has got to go outside of its own borders and carry the gospel to ev'ry creature, or it is no church of Christ; and any mutual improvement club which thinks that by reading its Shakspearo, or by acting its pretty tableaux, or by having. this or that little reading from Spenser and from Chaucer, it is going to lift itself up into any higher order of culture or life, is wholly mistaken, unless as an essential part of its duty, it goes out into the world, finds those that are falling down, and lifts them up to the majesty of freemen, who are sons of God."

"Look up and not down, look forward and not back, look out and not in, and lend a hand!"

"We went on in our quiet way. Life was purer and simpler and less annoyed to us, because constantly, now, we met with near and dear friends whom we had not known a day before, who looked up and not down, looked out and not in, looked forward and not backward, and were ready to lend a hand. Life seemed simpler to them, and it is my belief that to all of us, in proportion as we bothered less about cultivating ourselves, and were willing to spend and be spent for that without us, above us, and before us, life became infinite and this world became heaven."

"Why were all these salutes fired, the world over? Why was every capital illuminated? Why was there a holiday given to every school ? Halfholidays had been the universal custom for years before. It was simply, you see, that a tenth part of the people in the world had shown in some way worth belief that they meant — To look up and not down, To look forward and not back, To look out and not in, — and To lend a hand."

"That day the whole world held festival. All schools were dismissed, — all banks and workshops and factories closed, — all "unnecessary labor suspended," as the great salutes and the great chimes came booming out, which announced the agreement of a world of self-forgetting men. That day, do I say? Every day from that day was festival, — century after century. So soon as the world once learned the infinite blessing of Active Love, and stayed it by Faith, and enjoyed it in Hope, there was no danger that the world should unlearn that lesson. That lesson — if this vision of a possibility prove true — comes to the world by no change of law; by no new revelation, nor other gospel than the world has now. It comes simply as man after man and woman after woman lead such unselfish lives, as all of us see sometimes, as all would be glad to live..."

"You may divide literature into two great classes of books. The smaller class of the two consists of the books written by people who had something to say. They had in life learned something, or seen something, or done something, which they really wanted and needed to tell to other people. They told it. And their writings make, perhaps, a twentieth part of the printed literature of the world. It is the part which contains all that is worth reading. The other nineteen-twentieths make up the other class."

"Our first rule is, then, Know What You Want To Say. The second rule is, Say It. That is, do not begin by saying something else, which you think will lead up to what you want to say. I remember, when they tried to teach me to sing, they told me to "think of eight and sing seven." That may be a very good rule for singing, but it is not a good rule for talking, or writing, or any of the other things that I have to do. I advise you to say the thing you want to say. When I began to preach, another of my Nestors said to me, "Edward, I give you one piece of advice. When you have written your sermon, leave off the introduction and leave off the conclusion. The introduction seems to me always written to show that the minister can preach two sermons on one text. Leave that off, then, and it will do for another Sunday. The conclusion is written to apply to the congregation the doctrine of the sermon. But, if your hearers are such fools that they cannot apply the doctrine to themselves, nothing you can say will help them." In this advice was much wisdom. It consists, you see, in advising to begin, at the beginning, and to stop when you have done. Thirdly, and always, Use Your Own Language. I mean the language you are accustomed to use in daily life."

"Do you pray for the Senators, Dr. Hale?" someone asked the chaplain. "No, I look at the Senators and pray for the country."

"If you have accomplished all that you have planned for yourself, you have not planned enough."

"I am only one, but I am one. I can’t do everything, but I can do something. The something I ought to do, I can do. And by the grace of God, I will"

"Dr. Edward Everett Hale is one of my very oldest friends. I have known him since I was eight, and my love for him has increased with my years. His wise, tender sympathy has been the support of Miss Sullivan and me in times of trial and sorrow, and his strong hand has helped us over many rough places; and what he has done for us he has done for thousands of those who have difficult tasks to accomplish. He has filled the old skins of dogma with the new wine of love, and shown men what it is to believe, live and be free. What he has taught we have seen beautifully expressed in his own life — love of country, kindness to the least of his brethren, and a sincere desire to live upward and onward. He has been a prophet and an inspirer of men, and a mighty doer of the Word, the friend of all his race — God bless him!"

"Intend to live in continual mortification, and never to expect or desire any worldly ease or pleasure."

"There is, therefore, no difficulty in answering such questions as these. What cause was there why the Universe was placed in such a part of Space? and, Why was the Universe created at such a Time? for, if there be no Space beyond the Universe, it was impossible that it should be created in another place; and if there was no Time before, it was impossible it should be created at another time."

"They say there is a young lady in [New Haven] who is beloved of that Great Being, who made and rules the world, and that there are certain seasons in which this Great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight; and that she hardly cares for any thing, except to meditate on him— that she expects after a while to be received up where he is, to be raised up out of the world and caught up into heaven; being assured that he loves her too well to let her remain at a distance from him always. There she is to dwell with him, and to be ravished with his love and delight for ever. Therefore, if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards it and cares not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections; is most just and conscientious in all her conduct; and you could not persuade her to do any thing wrong or sinful, if you would give her all the world, lest she should offend this Great Being. She is of a wonderful sweetness, calmness, and universal benevolence of mind; especially after this Great God has manifested himself to her mind. She will sometimes go about from place to place, singing sweetly; and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure; and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always conversing with her."

"When I am giving the relation of a thing, remember to abstain from altering either in the matter or manner of speaking, so much, as that, if every one, afterwards, should alter as much, it would at last come to be properly false."

"To mark all that I say in conversation, merely to beget in others, a good opinion of myself, and examine it."

"The beauty of the world consists wholly of sweet mutual consents, either within itself or with the supreme being."

"Almost all men, and those that seem to be very miserable, love life, because they cannot bear to lose sight of such a beautiful and lovely world. The ideas, that every moment whilst we live have a beauty that we take not distinct notice of, brings a pleasure that, when we come to the trial, we had rather live in much pain and misery than lose."

"A little, wretched, despicable creature; a worm, a mere nothing, and less than nothing; a vile insect that has risen up in contempt against the majesty of Heaven and earth."

"I often used to sit and view the moon for a long time; and in the day spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things: in the mean time, singing forth, with a low voice, my contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer. And scarce any thing, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly nothing had been so terrible to me. Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunder-storm rising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoiced me. I felt God, if I may so speak, at the first appearance of a thunderstorm; and used to take the opportunity, at such times, to fix myself in order to view the clouds, and see the lightnings play, and hear the majestic and awful voice of God's thunder, which oftentimes was exceedingly entertaining, leading me to sweet contemplations of my great and glorious God. While thus engaged, it always seemed natural for me to sing, or chant forth my meditations; or to speak my thoughts in soliloquies with a singing voice."

"The soul of a true christian, as I then wrote my meditations, appeared like such a little white flower as we see in the spring of the year; low and humble on the ground, opening its bosom to receive the pleasant beams of the sun’s glory; rejoicing, as it were, in a calm rapture; diffusing around a sweet fragrancy; standing peacefully and lovingly, in the midst of other flowers round about; all in like manner opening their bosoms to drink in the light of the sun."

"Now shall the promises made to Christ by God the Father before the foundation of the world, the promises of the covenant of redemption, be fully accomplished. Christ shall now have perfectly obtained the joy set before Him, for which He undertook those great sufferings in His state of humiliation. Now shall all the hopes and expectations of the saints be fulfilled. The state of the church before was progressive and preparatory; but now she is arrived at her most perfect state of glory. All the glory of the church on earth is but a faint shadow of this her consummate glory in heaven."

"There are two sorts of hypocrites: one that are deceived with their outward morality and external religion; many of which are professed Arminians, in the doctrine of justification: and the other, are those that are deceived with false discoveries and elevations; which often cry down works, and men's own righteousness, and talk much of free grace; but at the same time make a righteousness of their discoveries, and of their humiliation, and exalt themselves to heaven with them. These two kinds of hypocrites, Mr. Shepard, in his Exposition of the Parable of the Ten Virgins, distinguishes by the names of legal and evangelical hypocrites; and often speaks of the latter as the worst. And it is evident that the latter are commonly by far the most confident in their hope, and with the most difficulty brought off from it: I have scarcely known the instance of such a one, in my life, that has been undeceived."

"I assert that nothing ever comes to pass without a cause."

"This dictate of common sense."

"Remember that pride is the worst viper that is in the heart, the greatest disturber of the soul's peace and sweet communion with Christ; it was the first sin that ever was, and lies lowest in the foundation of Satan's whole building, and is the most difficultly rooted out, and is the most hidden, secret and deceitful of all lusts, and often creeps in, insensibly, into the midst of religion and sometimes under the disguise of humility."

"In the text we have an account how this future glorious advancement of the church of God should be introduced; viz. By great multitudes in different towns and countries taking up a joint resolution, and coming into an express and visible agreement, that they will, by united and extraordinary prayer, seek to God, that he would come and manifest himself, and grant the tokens and fruits of his gracious presence."

"It is evident from the Scripture, that there is yet remaining a great advancement of the interest of religion and the kingdom of Christ in this world, by an abundant outpouring of the Spirit of God, far greater and more extensive than ever yet has been. It is certain, that many things, which are spoken concerning a glorious time of the church’s enlargement and prosperity in the latter days, have never yet been fulfilled."

"Resolved, that I will do whatsoever I think to be most to God's glory, and my own good, profit and pleasure, in the whole of my duration, without any consideration of the time, whether now, or never so many myriad's of ages hence. Resolved to do whatever I think to be my duty and most for the good and advantage of mankind in general. Resolved to do this, whatever difficulties I meet with, how many and how great soever."

"Resolved, never to lose one moment of time; but improve it the most profitable way I possibly can."

"Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live."

"Resolved, never to do anything which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life."

"Resolved, never to do anything out of revenge."

"Resolved, never to speak evil of anyone, so that it shall tend to his dishonor, more or less, upon no account except for some real good."

"Resolved, never to count that a prayer, nor to let that pass as a prayer, nor that as a petition of a prayer, which is so made, that I cannot hope that God will answer it; nor that as a confession, which I cannot hope God will accept."

"Resolved, to ask myself at the end of every day, week, month and year, wherein I could possibly in any respect have done better."

"Resolved, to confess frankly to myself all that which I find in myself, either infirmity or sin; and, if it be what concerns religion, also to confess the whole case to God, and implore needed help."

"Resolved, always to do that, which I shall wish I had done when I see others do it."

"A person is said to be justified, when he is approved of God as free from the guilt of sin and its deserved punishment, and as having that righteousness belonging to him that entitles to the reward of life. That we should take the word in such a sense, and understand it as the judge’s accepting a person as having both a negative and positive righteousness belonging to him, and looking on him therefore as not only free from any obligation to punishment, but also as just and righteous, and so entitled to a positive reward, is not only most agreeable to the etymology and natural import of the word, which signifies to pass one for righteousness in judgment, but also manifestly agreeable to the force of the word as used in Scripture."

"The apostle Paul is abundant in teaching, that 'we are justified by faith alone, without the works of the law!' There is no one doctrine that he insists so much upon, and that he handles with so much distinctness, explaining, giving reasons, and answering objections."

"Some that oppose this doctrine indeed say, that the apostle sometimes means that it is by faith, i.e. a hearty embracing the gospel in its first act only, or without any preceding holy life, that persons are admitted into a justified state; but, say they, it is by a persevering obedience that they are continued in a justified state, and it is by this that they are finally justified. But this is the same thing as to say, that a man on his first embracing the gospel is conditionally justified and pardoned. To pardon sin, is to free the sinner from the punishment of it, or from that eternal misery that is due to it; and therefore if a person is pardoned, or freed from this misery, on his first embracing the gospel, and yet not finally freed, but his actual freedom still depends on some condition yet to be performed, it is inconceivable how he can be pardoned otherwise than conditionally; that is, he is not properly actually pardoned, and freed from punishment, but only he has God’s promise that he shall be pardoned on future conditions. God promises him, that now, if he perseveres in obedience, he shall be finally pardoned, or actually freed from hell; which is to make just nothing at all of the apostle’s great doctrine of justification by faith alone. Such a conditional pardon is no pardon or justification at all, any more than all mankind have, whether they embrace the gospel or no; for they all have a promise of final justification on conditions of future sincere obedience, as much as he that embraces the gospel."

""But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness." -Romans iv. 5. The following things may be noted in this verse:...That justification respects a man as ungodly. This is evident by these words,—that justifieth the ungodly; which cannot imply less, than that God, in the act of justification, has no regard to any thing in the person justified, as godliness, or any goodness in him; but that immediately before this act, God beholds him only as an ungodly creature..."

"If Adam had finished his course of perfect obedience, he would have been justified: and certainly his justification would have implied something more than what is merely negative; he would have been approved of, as having fulfilled the righteousness of the law, and accordingly would have been adjudged to the reward of it. So Christ, our second surety, (in whose justification all whose surety he is, are virtually justified,) was not justified till he had done the work the Father had appointed him, and kept the Father’s commandments through all trials; and then in his resurrection he was justified. When he had been put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the spirit, 1 Pet. iii. 18. then he that was manifest in the flesh was justified in the spirit, 1 Tim. iii. 16.; but God, when he justified him in raising him from the dead, did not only release him from his humiliation for sin, and acquit him from any further suffering or abasement for it, but admitted him to that eternal and immortal life, and to the beginning of that exaltation that was the reward of what he had done. And indeed the justification of a believer is no other than his being admitted to communion in the justification of this head and surety of all believers; for as Christ suffered the punishment of sin, not as a private person, but as our surety; so when after this suffering he was raised from the dead, he was therein justified, not as a private person, but as the surety and representative of all that should believe in him. So that he was raised again not only for his own, but also for our justification, according to the apostle, Rom. iv. 25. “Who was delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification.” And therefore it is that the apostle says, as he does in Rom. viii. 34. “Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again."

"When it is said, that we are not justified by any righteousness or goodness of our own, what is meant is, that it is not out of respect to the excellency or goodness of any qualifications or acts in us whatsoever, that God judges it meet that this benefit of Christ should be ours; and it is not, in any wise, on account of any excellency or value that there is in faith, that it appears in the sight of God a meet thing, that he who believes should have this benefit of Christ assigned to him, but purely from the relation faith has to the person in whom this benefit is to be had, or as it unites to that mediator, in and by whom we are justified."

"Eph. i.6. "Who hath made us accepted in the beloved.” Our being in him is the ground or our being accepted. So it is in those unions to which the Holy Ghost has thought fit to compare this. The union of the members of the body with the head, is the ground of their partaking of the life of the head; it is the union of the branches to the stock, which is the ground of their partaking of the sap and life of the stock; it is the relation of the wife to the husband, that is the ground of her joint interest in his estate; they are looked upon, in several respects, as one in law. So there is a legal union between Christ and true Christians; so that (as all except Socinians allow) one, in some respects, is accepted for the other by the Supreme Judge.(Edwards writes later in the sermon... "What is real in the union between Christ and his people, is the foundation of what is legal; that is, it is something really in them, and between them, uniting them, that is the ground of the suitableness of their being accounted as one by the Judge.")"

"As there is nobody but what will allow that there is a peculiar relation between Christ and his true disciples, by which they are in some sense in Scripture said to be one so I suppose there is nobody but what will allow, that there may be something that the true Christian does on his part, whereby he is active in coming into this relation or union; some uniting act, or that which is done towards this union or relation (or whatever any please to call it) on the Christian’s part. Now faith I suppose to be this act."

"I do not now pretend to define justifying faith, or to determine precisely how much is contained in it, but only to determine thus much concerning it, viz. That it is that by which the soul, which before was separate and alienated from Christ, unites itself to him, or ceases to be any longer in that state of alienation, and comes into that forementioned union or relation to him; or to use the scripture phrase, it is that by which the soul comes to Christ, and receives him; and this is evident by the Scriptures using these very expressions to signify faith. John vi. 35-39. 'He that cometh to me, shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me, shall never thirst...'""

"The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber; the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow."

"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours."

"Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and switfly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider's web would have to stop a fallen rock."

"You have reason to wonder that you are not already in hell."

"All the virtues which appeared in Christ shone brightest in the close of His life, under the trials He then met. Eminent virtue always shows brightest in the fire. Pure gold shows its purity chiefly in the furnace. It was chiefly under those trials which Christ endured in the close of His life, that His love to God, His honor of God's majesty, His regard to the honor of His law, His spirit of obedience, His humility, contempt of the world, His patience, meekness, and spirit of forgiveness towards men, appeared. Indeed, every thing that Christ did to work out redemption for us appears mainly in the close of His life. Here mainly is His satisfaction for sin, and here chiefly is His merit of eternal life for sinners, and here chiefly appears the brightness of His example which He has set us for imitation."

"A greater absurdity cannot be thought of than a morose, hard-hearted, covetous, proud, malicious Christian."

"All the graces of Christianity always go together. They so go together that where there is one, there are all, and where one is wanting, all are wanting. Where there is faith, there are love, and hope, and humility; and where there is love, there is also trust; and where there is a holy trust in God, there is love to God; and where there is a gracious hope, there also is a holy fear of God."

"What tranquillity will there be in heaven! Who can express the fullness and blessedness of this peace! What a calm is this! How sweet and holy and joyous! What a haven of rest to enter, after having passed through the storms and tempests of this world, in which pride and selfishness and envy and malice and scorn and contempt and contention and vice are as waves of a restless ocean, always rolling, and often dashed about in violence and fury! What a Canaan of rest to come to, after going through this waste and howling wilderness, full of snares and pitfalls and poisonous serpents, where no rest could be found."

"Every Christian that goes before us from this world is a ransomed spirit waiting to welcome us in heaven."

"Confess your nothingness and ill-desert before God. Distrust yourself. Rely only upon God. Renounce all glory except from Him. Yield yourself heartily to His will and service. Avoid an aspiring, ambitious, ostentatious, assuming, arrogant, scornful, stubborn, willful, levelling, self-justifying behavior; and strive for more and more of the humble spirit that Christ manifested while He was here upon earth."

"Love is the active, working principle in all true faith. It is its very soul, without which it is dead. "Faith works by love.""

"Consider that as a principle of love is the main principle in the heart of a real Christian, so the labor of love, is the main business of the Christian life."

"By Christ's purchasing redemption, two things are intended, His satisfaction, and His merit. All is done by the price that Christ lays down, which does two things: it pays our debt, and so it satisfies; by its intrinsic value, and by the agreement between the Father and the Son it procures our title, and so it merits. The satisfaction of Christ is to free us from misery, and the merit of Christ is to purchase happiness for us."

"Whatever in Christ had the nature of satisfaction, was by virtue of His suffering or humiliation; whatever had the nature of merit, was by virtue of His obedience or righteousness."

"As God carries on the work of converting the souls of fallen men through all ages, so He goes on to justify them, to blot out all their sins, and to accept them as righteous in His sight through the righteousness of Christ. He goes on to adopt and receive them from being the children of Satan to be His own children, to carry on the work of His grace which He has begun in them, to comfort them with the consolations of His Spirit, and to bestow upon them, when their bodies die, that eternal glory which is the fruit of Christ's purchase."

"How great is your sin in rejecting Jesus Christ! You slight the glorious Person for whose coming God made such great preparation in such a series of wonderful providences from the beginning of the world, bringing to pass a thing before unknown, the union of the Divine nature with the human in one person. You have been guilty of slighting that great Saviour, who, after such preparation, actually accomplished the purchase of redemption, and who, after He had spent three or four and thirty years in poverty, labor, and contempt, in purchasing redemption, at last finished the purchase by closing His life under such extreme sufferings; and so by His death, and continuing for a time under the power of death, completed the whole. This is the Saviour you reject and despise. You make light of all the glory of His person, and of all the love of God the Father in sending Him into the world, and all His wonderful love appearing in the whole of His work."

"Religion, in its purity, is not so much a pursuit as a temper; or rather it is a temper, leading to the pursuit of all that is high and holy. Its foundation is faith; its action, works; its temper, holiness; its aim, obedience to God in improvement of self, and benevolence to men."

"Holy practice is the most decisive evidence of the reality of our repentance. "Bring forth fruits meet for repentance.""

"If you seek in the spirit of selfishness, to grasp all as your own, you shall lose all, and be driven out of the world, at last, naked and forlorn, to everlasting poverty and contempt."

"If there be ground for you to trust, as you do, in your own righteousness, then all that Christ did to purchase salvation, and all that God did from the fall of man to prepare the way for it, is in vain. Consider what greater folly could you have devised to charge upon God than this, that all those things were done so needlessly; when, instead of all this, He might only have called you forth, and committed the business to you, which you think you can do so easily."

"What self-righteous persons take to themselves, is the same work that Christ was engaged in when He was in His agony and bloody sweat, and when He died on the cross, which was the greatest thing that ever the eyes of angels beheld. Christ could accomplish other parts of this work without cost; but this part cost Him His life, as well as innumerable pains and labors. Yet this is the part which self-righteous persons go about to accomplish for themselves."

"You trust in your own doings to appease God for your sins, and to incline the heart of God to you. Though you are poor, worthless, vile, and polluted, yet you arrogantly take upon you that very work for which the Son of God became man; and in order to which God employed four thousand years in all the great dispensations of His providence, aiming chiefly to make way for Christ's coming to do this work. This is the work that you foolishly think yourselves sufficient for; as though your prayers and performances were excellent enough for this purpose. Consider how vain is the thought which you entertain of yourself. How must such arrogance appear in the sight of Christ, whom it cost so much? It was not to be obtained even by Him, so great and glorious a person, at a cheaper rate than His wading through a sea of blood, and passing through the midst of the furnace of God's wrath."

"You that trust in your own righteousness, arrogate to yourselves the honor of the greatest thing that even God Himself ever did. You seem not only sufficient to perform Divine works, but such is your pride and vanity, that you are not content without taking upon you to do the very greatest work that ever God Himself wrought. God's works of providence are greater than those of creation. To take on yourself to work out redemption, is a greater thing than if you had taken it upon you to create a world."

"Christian practice is that evidence which confirms every other indication of true godliness."

"Suppose Jonathan Edwards had been born a woman; suppose William James, for that matter, had been born a woman? (The invalid seclusion of his sister Alice is suggestive.) Even from men, New England took its psychic toll; many of its geniuses seemed peculiar in one way or another, particularly along the lines of social intercourse...Emily Dickinson-viewed by her bemused contemporary Thomas Higginson as "partially cracked," by the twentieth century as fey or pathological-has increasingly struck me as a practical woman, exercising her gift as she had to, making choices."

"Sonny, I'm old enough to have changed your nappies."

"If we do not add something to the knowledge of cosmic rays by our trip to the stratosphere this summer, we had better not go. We had better stay on the ground, be hewers of wood and drawers of water."

"When you fly a balloon you don’t file a flight plan; you go where the wind goes. You feel like part of the air. You almost feel like part of eternity, and you just float along."

"There are many reasons, some of them so deep-seated emotionally as to be very difficult of expression. Possibly the simplest explanation is that we started along this road … and I cannot stop until I have won."

"We must not, then, as Christians, assume an attitude of antagonism toward the truths of reason, or the truths of philosophy, or the truths of science, or the truths of history, or the truths of criticism. As children of the light, we must be careful to keep ourselves open to every ray of light. Let us, then, cultivate an attitude of courage as over against the investigations of the day. None should be more zealous in them than we. None should be more quick to discern truth in every field, more hospitable to receive it, more loyal to follow it, whither soever it leads."

"From the empty grave of Jesus the enemies of the cross turn away in unconcealable dismay. Christ has risen from the dead! After two thousand years of the most determined assault upon the evidence which establishes it, that fact stands. And so long as it stands, Christianity too must stand as the one supernatural religion. The resurrection of Christ is the fundamental apologetical fact of Christianity."

"Our rulers (both here and in Great Britain) will now have leisure to attend to every part of our American polity; and, among other things, to the state of Indians: … they have been looked upon as untamed and untameable monsters; whom, like the devoted nations around Judea, it was a kind of religion with white men to exterminate. We have treated them with a rigour and severity equally unsuitable to the genius of our government, and the mild spirit of our religion."

"Territory we do not want; having, it is probable, already more than we well know how to manage. Instead therefore of countenancing that vagrant and unsettled way of life which has become habitual to so many of our people; and that very general passion they have to be for ever running back in quest of fresh lands; a practice not more unpropitious to all agricultural improvements, than likely to keep us involved in Indian wars; let us enlarge our empire by the civilization of the Indians; who already have a better title to any of our un-located lands, than we can possibly give any new comers"

"Were an impartial and competent observer of the state of society in these middle colonies asked, whence it happens that Virginia and Maryland (which were the first planted, and which are superior to many colonies and inferior to none, in point of natural advantage) are still so exceedingly behind most of the other British trans-Atlantic possessions in all those improvements which bring credit and consequence to a country? - he would answer - They are so, because they are cultivated by slaves. … Some loss and inconvenience would, no doubt, arise from the general abolition of slavery in these colonies: but were it done gradually, with judgement, and with good temper, I have never yet seen it satisfactorily proved that such inconvenience would either be great or lasting. … If ever these colonies, now filled with slaves, be improved to their utmost capacity, an essential part of the improvement must be the abolition of slavery. Such a change would hardly be more to the advantage of the slaves, than it would be to their owners."

"[Boucher admits that the use of slavery in the British colonies is better regulated than in other countries, but notes that:] "it is surely worse in this, that here, in one sense, it never can end. An African slave, even when made free, supposing him to be possessed even of talents and of virtue, can never, in these colonies, be quite on terms of equality with a free white man.""

"[In a later footnote, he explains further:] "children can never be upbraided with their having had a felon for a father: whereas the descendants of a white person, married to a black one, would, for many generations, by their complexion, proclaim their origin. Accordingly, though many mulattoes and people of colour have obtained wealth, I remember no instance, in any European colony, of their having obtained rank.""

"In one essential point, I fear, we are all deficient: they are nowhere sufficiently instructed. I am far from recommending it to you, at once to set them all free; because to do so would be an heavy loss to you, and probably no gain to them: but I do entreat you to make them some amends for the drudgery of their bodies by cultivating their minds. … though they still continue to be your slaves, they shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God."

"It is surprising what improper and indecent contentions these popular elections occasioned. I have oftener than once known half-a-dozen candidates all trying for a vacant parish, and preaching alternately, to give their electors an opportunity of determining what they liked best. Voice and action, as is remarked in a very humorous pamphlet respecting London lectureships, almost constantly carried it. … Preachers and ministers so elected, continuing still in some degree dependent on the people, continued also chiefly to cultivate those arts by which their favour had first been gained. Their sermons were light, flippant, and ordinary; but their manner of preaching was pleasing and popular."

"As for lawyers, they seemed to grow up spontaneously; many of the first name and note in that profession were men without any education, and totally illiterate. Such a state of society was peculiar, and could not but have peculiar effects; for no other body of men, nor all the other bodies of men put together, had half so much influence as the lawyers...."

"That the people of America should be severed from Great Britain, even your fellow Congressionalists from the North would not be hardy enough yet to avow; but that this will certainly follow from the measures you have been induced by them to adopt, is obvious to every man who is permitted yet to think for himself. … see ye not that after some few years of civil broils all the fair settlements in the middle and southern colonies will be seized on by our more enterprising and restless fellow-colonists of the North? At first and for a while perhaps they may be contented to be the Dutch of America, i.e. to be our carriers and fishmongers, for which no doubt, as their sensible historian [Edmund Burke] has observed, they seem to be destined by their situation, soil, and climate: but had so sagacious an observer foreseen that a time might come when all North America should be independent, he would, it is probable, have added to his other remark, that those his Northern brethren would then become also the Goths and Vandals of America."

"I would not live alway: I ask not to stay Where storm after storm rises dark o’er the way."

"That heavenly music! what is it I hear? The notes of the harpers ring sweet in mine ear. And, see, soft unfolding those portals of gold, The King all arrayed in his beauty behold!"

"The head should not be furnished at the expense of the heart."

"Religion should never be held to account for inferior scholarship."

"I have sinned against you, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God's forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me anymore."

"Let me say this to you very clearly and those of you who're watching over the Internet: [holding up Bible] There is one God in this book. It is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Allah is not God; Buddha is not God; Mary is not God; Mary Baker Eddy is not God; birds, animals and bugs are not God. Jehovah God is the God of all gods. He is a jealous God, and He demands that He be the Lord of all, or not at all!"

"God says in Jeremiah 16: "Behold, I will bring them"—the Jewish people—"again unto their land that I gave unto their fathers." That would be Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. "Behold, I will send for many fishers, and after will I send for many hunters. And they, the hunters, shall hunt them"—that will be the Jews—"from every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks." If that doesn't describe what Hitler did in the Holocaust … you can't see that? So think about this: "I will send fishers and I will send hunters." A fisher is someone who entices you with a bait. How many of you know who Theodor Herzl was? How many of you don't have a clue who he was? Woo, sweet God! Theodor Herzl is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew that at the turn of the 19th century said, "This land is our land. God wants us to live there." So he went to the Jews of Europe and said, "I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel." So few went, Herzl went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the Holocaust. Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says—Jeremiah, right?—"they shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and out of the holes of the rocks." Meaning there's no place to hide. And that will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn't write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth, and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, "My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel." Today Israel is back in the land, and they are at Ezekiel 37:8. They are physically alive, but they're not spiritually alive. Now, how is God going to cause the Jewish people to come spiritually alive and say, "The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, He is God"?"

"Most readers will be shocked by the clear record of history linking Adolf Hitler and the Roman Catholic Church in a conspiracy to exterminate the Jews."

"Anyone who makes the life of Jewish people difficult or grievous, as did the Pharaoh, as did Hitler, will be cursed by God."

"What happened in New Orleans looked like the curse of God. In time, if New Orleans recovers and becomes the pristine city, it can become—it may in time be called a blessing. But at this time, it's called a curse."

"All hurricanes are acts of God because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that."

"John Hagee: In the case of New Orleans, their plan to have that homosexual rally was sin. But it never happened. The rally never happened. Dennis Prager: No, I understand. John Hagee: It was scheduled that Monday. Dennis Prager: No, I'm only trying to understand that in the case of New Orleans, you do feel that God's hand was in it because of a sinful city? John Hagee: That it was a city that was planning a sinful conduct, yes."

"We have allowed the worship of Satanism in the U.S. military. Most Americans are not aware of that, and we wonder why it takes us ten years to defeat our weak enemies as Moses said in Deuteronomy 28. How is it that, in World War II, we whipped the world in four years, and now we're bogged down in one lingering war after another that does nothing but rape our economy and kill our young men? Why? Maybe the God of Heaven is not with us. He says when you accept another God, I leave. I'm either the only Lord, or you're on your own. That means: stop voting for pagans and putting them in public office."

"That's why my generation thinks we need a constitutional amendment to protect the sanctity of marriage that guarantees that, in America, the only marriage to be recognized is the marriage between a man and a woman! In the house of God! There are so many things in America that have changed that should never change. And you listen to me: if it does, you can kiss this country goodbye."

"Christians don't steal or lie, they don't get divorced or have abortions. If the Ten Commandments were followed by everyone, we would be able to fire half the police force, and in six months the prisons would be all half empty."

"Do you know the difference between a woman with PMS and a snarling Doberman pinscher? The answer is lipstick. Do you know the difference between a terrorist and a woman with PMS? You can negotiate with a terrorist."

"Why would you want to be politically correct when you can be right?"

"What is the point of having free speech if you have nothing to say?"

"You will either offend the world and please God, or please the world and offend God."

"The most important thing to the Christian community is not the environment, but evangelism."

"Jesus did not come to the Earth to start 285 squabbling denominations fighting over the Bible. How like the devil to divide Christians over the Bible."

"If you live your life and don't confess your sins to God Almighty through the authority of Christ and His blood—I'm going to say this very plainly—you're going straight to hell with a nonstop ticket."

"Life is a voyage. The winds of life come strong From every point; yet each will speed thy course along, If thou with steady hand when tempests blow Canst keep thy course aright and never once let go."

"Death is an angel with two faces: To us he turns A face of terror, blighting all things fair; The other burns With glory of the stars, and love is there."

"He entered; but the mask he wore Concealed his face from me. Still, something I had seen before He brought to memory. "Who art thou? What thy rank, thy name?" I questioned, with surprise; "Thyself" the laughing answer came, "As seen of others' eyes.""

"Why should I stay? Nor seed nor fruit have I, But, sprung at once to beauty’s perfect round, Nor loss nor gain nor change in me is found,— A life-complete in death-complete to die."

"You are the descendant of a tiny cell of primordial protoplasm washed up on an empty beach three and a half billion years ago. You are the blind and arbitrary product of time, chance, and natural forces. You are a mere grab-bag of atomic particles, a conglomeration of genetic substance. You exist on a tiny planet in a minute solar system in an empty corner of a universe. You are a purely biological entity, different only in degree but not in kind from a microbe, virus, or amoeba. You have no essence beyond your body, and at death you will cease to exist entirely. In short you come from nothing and are going to nowhere."

"You are the special creation of a good and all-powerful God. You are created in His image; with capacities to think, feel, and worship that set you above all other life forms. You differ from the animals not simply in degree but in kind. Not only is your kind unique, but you are unique among you kind. Your Creator loves you so much and so intensely desires you companionship and affection that he has a perfect plan for you life. In addition God gave the life of His only son that you might spend eternity with Him. If you are willing to accept his gift of salvation, you can become a child of God."

"As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around."

"In the Middle East, Iraq, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland, and many other places in the world, religion has been so divisive that people have killed one another, believing they were doing the work of God."

"The problem is not that Christians are conservative or liberal, but that some are so confident that their position is God's position that they become dismissive and intolerant toward others and divisive forces in our national life."

"Whether religion is a divisive or reconciling force depends on our certainty or our humility as we practice our faith in our politics. If we believe that we know God's truth and that we can embody that truth in a political agenda, we divide the realm of politics into those who are on God's side, which is our side, and those with whom we disagree, who oppose the side of God. This is neither good religion nor good politics. It is not consistent with following a Lord who reached out to a variety of people — prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers. If politics is the art of compromise, certainty is not really politics, for how can one compromise with God's own truth? Reconciliation depends on acknowledging that God's truth is greater than our own, that we cannot reduce it to any political platform we create, no matter how committed we are to that platform, and that God's truth is large enough to accommodate the opinions of all kinds of people, even those with whom we strongly disagree."

"We are seekers of the truth, but we do not embody the truth. And in humility, we should recognize that the same can be said about our most ardent foes."

"I had not been left behind in the parish. I wasn't holding the hands of grieving widows. I wasn't struggling to educate my children. I was pontificating on the great issues of the day in the comfort of a privileged lifestyle."

"Most of all, faith brings recognition that our quest never leads us to certainty. We are always uncertain, always in doubt that our way is God's way. That self-doubt makes it possible to be reconciled to one another. It is faith that makes the reconciling work of politics possible."

"But the public display of religion is not God. We do not put God in our nation's life by placing the Ten Commandments in courthouses, nor do we evict God by removing the Ten Commandments from public property. God is not portable. Bland prayers, offered as noncontroversial formalities after the National Anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance do little to honor God."

"Many, if not most, Americans can imagine a fate worse than death, and it is a seemingly interminable process of dying. For them, it is frightening that politicians can find ways to interject themselves into this sad process."

"I think a lot of us share a fear that we and people we love will lose control of our own destinies at the end of life."

"At least Alzheimer's patients do not know what is happening to their brains and bodies. Some say this makes Alzheimer's less terrible than ALS, where the patient understands everything. But if lack of comprehension is of some small blessing to the Alzheimer's victim, it does nothing to help the family. Care of the stricken spouse or parent can consume a family's time, energy and resources. Instead of enjoying retirement years, a husband or wife, whose own strength may be declining with age, can find every day consumed by care giving. Then there is the wrenching decision of whether to place the loved one in a nursing home, a decision that can result in enormous cost, not to mention guilt."

"The relationship of faith and politics is not about fashioning religious beliefs into political platforms. It is, instead, the way in which faithful people go about the work of politics. If it were the former, family values could be reduced to legislation, but despite the efforts of Christian conservatives, that is not possible. Family values concern how a person, in my case a political person, values his family, his wife and his children. Is the family, especially the spouse, first on the list of priorities, or is it somewhere down the line?"

"Valuing family more than job gives perspectives to politics. It puts the politician in the proper place, which is somewhere less than being the self-perceived agent of God. If family comes first, the politician needs to find ways to make that clear- by words, symbols and actions. The politician must make the effort. By its nature, the job will not do it for him."

"The Senate is indeed a deliberative body, and that quality serves the nation well. A slow-moving government helps us maintain a stable government. But slow moving is not the same as immobile."

"We have a God-given commission, but it is not a commission to be self-righteous know-it-alls- quite the contrary. Our work in God's world begins with the acknowledgment that we are not God, and that our most bitter rivals are made in God's image."

"The starting point is the recognition that throughout history, religion has been a cause of bloodshed, and it remains so today. Because religion has contributed to the world's problems, it must develop specific and practical ways to help solve those problems."

"Plenty of kind, decent, caring people have no religious beliefs, and they act out of the goodness of their hearts. Conversely, plenty of people who profess to be religious, even those who worship regularly, show no particular interest in the world beyond themselves."

"When you see your neighbors, their needs, their joys, their sorrows, when you see them next door or halfway around the world, you will know what to do. It is concern that precedes and inspires agendas, and survives when agendas fail, and it causes us to try again, always trying our best, never certain about our own judgment. It is knowing that God's purpose exceeds whatever we can put in an agenda. For Christians, it is trusting in the guidance of the Holy Spirit."

"When we vest our personal opinions with the trappings of religion, we make religion the servant of our politics."

"The old adage that polite conversation should not include talk of politics or religion is understandable because both subjects are so heavily laden with emotion that discussion can quickly turn to shouting. Blood is shed over politics, religion and the two in combination."

"Many have said that President Trump isn’t a Republican. They are correct, but for a reason more fundamental than those usually given. Some focus on Trump’s differences from mainstream GOP policies, but the party is broad enough to embrace different views, and Trump agrees with most Republicans on many issues. Others point to the insults he regularly directs at party members and leaders, but Trump is not the first to promote self above party. The fundamental reason Trump isn’t a Republican is far bigger than words or policies. He stands in opposition to the founding principle of our party — that of a united country. We are the party of Abraham Lincoln, and our founding principle is our commitment to holding the nation together. This brought us into being just before the Civil War. The first resolution of the platform at the party’s first national convention states in part that "the union of the States must and shall be preserved.""

"That founding principle of the party is also a founding principle of the United States. Even when we were a tiny fraction of our present size and breadth, the framers of our Constitution understood the need for holding ourselves together, whatever our differences. They created a constitutional structure and a Bill of Rights that would accommodate within one nation all manner of interests and opinions. Americans honor that principle in the national motto on the presidential seal: "e pluribus unum" — "out of many, one." Today, the United States is far more diverse than when we were a nation of 3 million people , but the principle remains the same: We are of many different backgrounds, beliefs, races and creeds, and we are one."

"Our record hasn’t been perfect. When we have pushed the agenda of the Christian right, we have seemed to exclude people who don’t share our religious beliefs. We have seemed unfriendly to gay Americans. But our long history has been to uphold the dignity of all of God’s people and to build a country welcoming to all. Now comes Trump, who is exactly what Republicans are not, who is exactly what we have opposed in our 160-year history. We are the party of the Union, and he is the most divisive president in our history. There hasn’t been a more divisive person in national politics since George Wallace."

"It isn’t a matter of occasional asides, or indiscreet slips of the tongue uttered at unguarded moments. Trump is always eager to tell people that they don’t belong here, whether it’s Mexicans, Muslims, transgender people or another group. His message is, "You are not one of us," the opposite of "e pluribus unum." And when he has the opportunity to unite Americans, to inspire us, to call out the most hateful among us, the KKK and the neo-Nazis, he refuses."

"We cannot allow Donald Trump to redefine the Republican Party. That is what he is doing, as long as we give the impression by our silence that his words are our words and his actions are our actions. We cannot allow that impression to go unchallenged. As has been true since our beginning, we Republicans are the party of Lincoln, the party of the Union. We believe in our founding principle. We are proud of our illustrious history. We believe that we are an essential part of present-day American politics. Our country needs a responsibly conservative party. But our party has been corrupted by this hateful man, and it is now in peril. In honor of our past and in belief in our future, for the sake of our party and our nation, we Republicans must disassociate ourselves from Trump by expressing our opposition to his divisive tactics and by clearly and strongly insisting that he does not represent what it means to be a Republican."

"I was raised in a Republican household during the glory days of "I like Ike!” I am currently an independent voter who votes on the integrity of the individual and the facts surrounding the issues. I have read the Mueller Report, and recently listened to the televised Congressional Mueller hearings, and listened to analysis by both CNN and Fox. As a citizen, I have come to the conclusion that President Trump attempted to obstruct Mueller’s investigation in multiple ways. The OLC opinion blocked Mueller from indicting a sitting president, but he stated that an ordinary citizen facing these charges would face a criminal indictment."

"I find the president guilty of both obstruction and collusion. Mueller has left it up to Congress to carry this process forward with impeachment according to Article I of the Constitution. Section 3 of Article I gives the Republican-controlled Senate the responsibility to try all Impeachments. Republicans, by and large, have chosen to remain mute in the face of President Trump’s attacks on freedom of the press, the judiciary, the Intelligence Department and our NATO allies, while failing to demand Vladimir Putin to stop meddling in our elections. President Trump suffers from a troubling personality disorder called malignant narcissism, which has limited his ability to develop into a fully formed adult male. His juvenile attacks and outbursts are a result. His prolific lying is necessary to create a reality that supports his fragile ego. This is unfortunate in an ordinary citizen but dangerous in an individual occupying the presidency of the United States."

"Should we leave this seriously flawed individual in charge of our nation, and in extension, the free world? I think not. Each of us as citizens of this democracy have a duty to listen, learn and act in the best interest of our fellow citizens. That’s what we just celebrated on July Fourth. Look at the evidence, decide for yourself, and let our elected officials know how you would direct them to act. If Americans abdicate this responsibility on such a serious matter, perhaps we don’t deserve the democracy that so many have given their lives for."

"The Bible is a window in this prison-world, through which we may look into eternity."

"It is impossible for the mind which is not totally destitute of piety, to behold the sublime, the awful, the amazing works of creation and providence — the heavens with their luminaries, the mountains, the ocean, the storm, the earthquake, the volcano, the circuit of the seasons, and the revolutions of empires — without marking in them all the mighty hand of God, and feeling strong emotions of reverence toward the Author of these stupendous works."

"What must be the knowledge of Him, from whom all created minds have derived both their power of knowledge, and the innumerable objects of their knowledge! What must be the wisdom of Him, from whom all things derive their wisdom!"

"The golden chain of affection is binding together all who compose the goodly fellowship of the saints. Calvary rather than Sinai is the typical source of the church's inspiration; and bonds of law are being supplanted by bonds of love Indeed, the whole host of the redeemed is marching in solid phalanx against the combined forces of ignorance and error, of depravity and sin; while, high above all the regimental standards, floats the banner of the cross, blazoned with this suggestive inscription, "Everyone that loveth is born of God.""

"The church and the world alike demand that those who profess to love the Lord should be careful to love their brethren also. It is for them to have in essentials unity, in non-essentials diversity, in all things charity. Only so can the church realize the ideal of its Divine Founder, and foreshadow its future excellence and beauty. Only so can this spiritual structure be celestial and glorious, revealing in all its fair proportions from dome and turret, from glittering spires and airy traceries, its marvelous symmetry and oneness, while at the same time it swells from every organ pipe, and chants in every choral anthem the praises of Him whose essence is love, and whose being is characterized by unity."

"The only satisfactory manifestations of religious character and life are associated with the reciprocal influences of spiritual experience and aggressive activity."

"The Christian's life on this side and beyond the grave is essentially the same, differing only as a song which, at a certain point, changes from the minor to the major key, and thenceforth wells along with still more glorious harmonies."

"In the whole range of earthly experience, no quality is more attractive and ennobling than moral courage. Like that mountain of rock which towers aloft in the Irish Sea, the man possessed of this principle is unmoved by the swelling surges which fret and fume at his feet. And yet, unlike that same Ailsa Craig, he is sensitive beyond measure to every adverse influence — battling against it, and triumphing over it by a power which proceeds from God's throne, and pervades his entire being."

"It is neither possible nor desirable to make all men think alike. Variety is the very basis of harmony; and, in the sphere of ecclesiastical experience, oneness of feeling is vastly preferable to unanimity of belief. The voice of God, however, as uttered in the events and experiences of the past hundred years, enjoins upon the private membership of the church the culture of that "unity of the Spirit " which is begotten of the Holy Ghost, and which derives from its Divine Author the life in which it resides, the elements of which it is composed, and the impulses under which it acts."

"Religion, as embodied in the character and conduct of its disciples, cannot survive without doctrinal purity. In the absence of this element, religious feeling inevitably decays; while even religious necessity becomes a thing of naught."

"In the whole range of human vision, nothing is more attractive than to see a young^ man full of promise and of hope, bending all his energies in the direction of truth and duty and God, his soul pervaded with the loftiest enthusiasm, and his life consecrated to the noblest ends. To be such a young man is to rival the noblest and best of men in heroic valor and Christian chivalry. Nay, to be such a young man is to be like Christ, the highest type, the most illustrious example of enthusiasm the world has ever seen."

"The tree of human history, as it has grown from age to age, has been but the unfolding of a single germ — but the development of Christ and Him crucified."

"All true development tends ever to God. Its objective aim is the restoration by the second Adam of the Divine image forfeited by the first; and, incidentally, it transmutes grief into gladness and sighs into songs. But it is always a development in Christ, since it is only " in the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God " that any of our race can come "unto a perfect man.""

"Christ's gospel could never have been delivered by one who was diseased."

"True heroism is alike positive and progressive. It sees in right the duty which should dominate, and in truth the principle which should prevail. And hence it never falters in the faith that always and everywhere sin must be repressed, and righteousness exalted."

"Vital is the relation between earthly sorrow and eternal satisfaction. The travail to which God's saints are subjected results in the birth of nobler natures and more sanctified spirits. Pain always promotes progress, and suffering invariably ensures success."

"It is for all who are personally united to Christ to cultivate a contemplative and sanctified spirit. So far from being secular and sordid, they should be sacred and spiritual, having their lives hid with Christ in God, and their whole natures absorbed in the knowledge and love and service of the Saviour."

"The sufferings and death of Jesus Christ are a substitution for the endless punishment of all who truly believe on Him."

"If we can keep our minds calm on the subject of the "Eternity of God," if reason does not totter on her seat at the contemplation of underived existence, it will be strange if any other mystery relating to God should disturb us. He who can bring his reason to bow reverently at the idea of a Being who had no beginning, is well prepared to receive any communication of His will."

"A certain joyful, though humble, confidence becomes us when we pray in the Mediator's name. It is due to Him; when we pray in His name it should be without wavering. Remember His merits, and how prevalent they must be. " Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace.""

"Though, in debating with regard to theories, it be lawful to say whether this or that is consistent with the Divine attributes, yet, when we find that God has actually done any thing, all question about its justice, wisdom, and benevolence, is forever out of place."

"There are regions beyond the most nebulous outskirts of matter; but no regions beyond the divine goodness. We may conceive of tracts where there are no worlds, but not of any where there us no God of mercy."

"The true recipe for a miserable existence is this: Quarrel with Providence."

"The life-boat may have a tasteful bend and beautiful decoration, but these are not the qualities for which I prize it; it was my salvation from the howling sea! So the interest which a regenerate soul takes in the Bible, is founded on a personal application to the heart of the saving truth which it contains."

"Virtue consists in doing our duty in the several relations we sustain in respect to ourselves, to our fellow men, and to God, as known from reason, conscience, and revelation."

"We must reinstate Jesus in the rightful place which belongs to Him in the church; or the church will soon be driven into the wilderness."

"Jesus aimed to impregnate the natural with the spiritual, and to resolve all our avocations into a heavenly discipline."

"I cannot hear thy voice with others' ears, Who make of thy lost liberty a gain; And in thy tale of blighted hopes and fears Feel not that every note is born with pain."

"I saw a worm, with many a fold; It spun itself a silken tomb; And there in winter time enrolled, It heeded not the cold or gloom."

"God walked alone unhonored through the earth; For Him no heart-built temple open stood, The soul forgetful of her nobler birth Had hewn him lofty shrines of stone and wood, And left unfinished and in ruins still The only temple he delights to fill."

"Wilt Thou not visit me? The plant beside me feels Thy gentle dew; And every blade of grass I see, From Thy deep earth its quickening moisture drew."

"Come! for I need Thy love, More than the flower the dew, or grass the rain; Come like Thy Holy Dove, And let me in Thy sight rejoice to live again."

"The world doth ever change; there is no peace Among the shallows of its storm-vexed breast; With every breath the frothy waves increase, They toss up mire and dirt, they cannot rest; I thank Thee that within thy strong-built ark My soul across the uncertain sea can sail, And though the night of death be long and dark, My hopes in Christ shall reach within the veil; And to the promised haven steady steer, Whose rest to those who love is ever near."

"I saw on earth another light Than that which lit my eye Come forth as from my soul within, And from a higher sky."

"'Twas brighter far than noonday's beam; It shone from God within, And lit, as by a lamp from heaven, The world's dark track of sin."

"I see them, crowd on crowd they walk the earth, Dry leafless trees no autumn wind laid bare; And in their nakedness find cause for mirth, And all unclad would winter's rudeness dare; No sap doth through their clattering branches flow, Whence springing leaves and blossoms bright appear; Their hearts the living God have ceased to know, Who gives the springtime to th' expectant year."

"They borrow words for thoughts they cannot feel"

"People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize. By presuppositions we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic world view, the grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. People's presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions."

"The direction in which science will move is set by the philosophic world view of the scientists."

"History indicates that at a certain point of economic breakdown people cease being concerned with individual liberties and are ready to accept regimentation. The danger is obviously even greater when the two main values so many people have are personal peace and affluence."

"Now, not all the founding fathers were individually, personally, Christians. That certainly is true. But, nevertheless, they founded the country on the base that there is a God who is the Creator (now I come to the next central phrase) who gave the inalienable rights."

"We must understand something very thoroughly. If society — if the state gives the rights, it can take them away — they're not inalienable. If the states give the rights, they can change them and manipulate them. But this was not the view of the founding fathers of this country. They believed, although not all of them were individual Christians, that there was a Creator and that this Creator gave the inalienable rights — this upon which our country was founded and which has given us the freedoms which we still have — even the freedoms which are being used now to destroy the freedoms."

"The reason that these freedoms were there is because they believed there was somebody who gave the inalienable rights. But if we have the view that the final reality is material or energy which has existed forever in some form, we must understand that this view never, never, never would have given the rights which we now know and which, unhappily, I say to you (those of you who are Christians) that too often you take all too much for granted."

"Cambridge historians who aren't Christians would tell you that if it wasn't for the Wesley revival and the social change that Wesley's revival had brought, England would have had its own form of the French Revolution. It was Wesley saying people must be treated correctly and dealing down into the social needs of the day that made it possible for England to have its bloodless revolution in contrast to France's bloody revolution."

"His death there on Calvary's cross is for us individually, but it's not egotistically individualistic. Our individual salvation will one day be a portion of the restoration of all things. It is our calling until He comes back again that happy day, to do all we can — while it won't be perfect as when He comes back — to see substantial healing in every area that He will then perfectly heal, and that Wesley did understand."

"The dead leaves their rich mosaics Of olive and gold and brown Had laid on the rain-wet pavements, Through all the embowered town."

"He sows June fields with clover, and the world Broadcasts with little common kindnesses. The plain good souls He sends us, who fulfill Life's homely duties in the daily path With cheerful heart, ambitious of no more Than to supply the wants of friend and kin, Yet serve God's higher love to human hearts; Giving a secret sweetness to the home, The hidden fragrance of a kindly heart, The simple beauty of a useful life, That never dazzles, and that never tires."

"God does not love you because you are good, God loves you because God is good."

"Power should be entrusted only to those who do not seek it."

"The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo—even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future."

"We worshiped Jesus instead of following him on his same path. We made Jesus into a mere religion instead of a journey toward union with God and everything else. This shift made us into a religion of 'belonging and believing' instead of a religion of transformation."

"Religion has not tended to create seekers or searchers, has not tended to create honest, humble people who trust that God is always beyond them. We aren’t focused on the great mystery. Religion has, rather, tended to create people who think they have God in their pockets, people with quick, easy, glib answers. That’s why so much of the West is understandably abandoning religion. People know the great mystery cannot be that simple and facile."

"Group-think is a substitute for God-think. The belief is that God is found only by our group. The next step is to establish that identification with our group as the only way to serve God."

"The world, the system, moves forward out of fear. That’s why they have to threaten us to play the game. We’re threatened with loss of job, money, reputation, or prestige. It’s all based on fear."

"We have defined freedom in the West as the freedom to choose between options and preferences. That’s not primal freedom. That’s a secondary or even tertiary freedom. The primal freedom is the freedom to be the self, the freedom to live in the truth despite all circumstances. That’s what great religion offers us. That’s what real prayer offers us. That’s why the saints could be imprisoned and not lose their souls. They could be put down and persecuted like Jesus and still not lose their joy, their heart, or their perspective. Secular freedom is having to do what you want to do. Religious freedom is wanting to do what you have to do."

"What we know about God is important, but what we do with what we know about God is even more important. Too often people think it is necessary that we all see God in the same way (which is impossible anyway), but what is really necessary is that we all follow God according to what God tells us. The fact that God has given us so many different faces and temperaments and emotions and histories shows us how God honors each unique journey and culture. God is not threatened by differences. It’s we who are."

"Prayer must lead us beyond mind, words, and ideas to a more spacious place where God has a chance to get in."

"So much is happening on earth that cannot be fixed or explained, but it can be felt and suffered. I think a Christian is one who, along with Jesus, agrees to feel, to suffer the pain of the world."

"Much of my criticism of religion comes about when I see it not only affirming the system of normalcy but teaching folks how to live there comfortably. It just increases our “stuckness” in the old world. As does a lot of poor psychotherapy. Cheap religion teaches us how to live successfully in a sick system."

"Abuse of any one generally shows that he has marked traits of character. The stupid and indifferent are passed by in silence."

"Accuracy of statement is one of the first elements of truth; inaccuracy is a near kin to falsehood."

"Age does not depend upon years, but upon temperament and health. Some men are born old, and some never grow so."

"Anecdotes are sometimes the best vehicles of truth, and if striking and appropriate are often more impressive and powerful than argument."

"Anxiety is the rust of life, destroying its brightness and weakening its power. – A childlike and abiding trust in Providence is its best preventive and remedy."

"Prejudices are rarely overcome by argument; not being founded in reason they cannot be destroyed by logic."

"The desires and longings of man are vast as eternity, and they point him to it."

"The leaves in autumn do not change color from the blighting touch of frost, but from the process of natural decay. They fall when the fruit is ripened, and their work is done. And their splendid coloring is but their graceful and beautiful surrender of life when they have finished their summer offering of service to God and man. And one of the great lessons the fall of the leaf teaches is this : Do your work well, and then be ready to depart when God shall call."

"Have something to say ; say it ; and stop when you’ve done."

"Never be so brief as to become obscure."

"Between two evils, choose neither; between two goods, choose both."

"Compromise is but the sacrifice of one right or good in the hope of retaining another – too often ending in the loss of both."

"We never do evil so thoroughly and heartily as when led to it by an honest but perverted, because mistaken, conscience."

"Contemplation is to knowledge, what digestion is to food – the way to get life out of it."

"Most controversies would soon be ended, if those engaged in them would first accurately define their terms, and then adhere to their definitions."

"Credulity is belief on slight evidence, with no evidence, or or against evidence. In this sense it is the infidel, not the believer, who is credulous. 'The simple,' says Solomon, 'believeth every word.'"

"This world is the land of the dying ; the next is the land of the living."

"Deference is the instinctive respect which we pay to the great and good. The unconcious acknowledgement of the superiority or excellence of others."

"Thoughts lead on to purposes ; puposes go forth in actions ; actions form habits ; habits decide character ; and character fixes our destiny."

"Deviation from either truth or duty is a downward path, and none can say where the descent will end. – 'He that despiseth small things shall fall by little and little.'"

"The great end of education is, to discipline rather than to furnish the mind ; to train it to the use of its own powers, rather than fill it with the accumulation of others."

"The first evil choice or act is linked to the second ; and each one to the one that follows, both by the tendency of our evil nature and by the power of habit, which holds us as by a destiny. – As Lessing says, 'Let the devil catch you but by a single hair, and you are his forever.'"

"People never improve unless they look to some standard or example higher and better than themselves."

"Facts are God’s arguments : we should be careful never to misunderstand or pervert them."

"Fables, like parables, are more ancient than formal arguments and are often the most effective means of presenting and impressing both truth and duty."

"Science has sometimes been said to be opposed to faith, and inconsistent with it. But all science, in fact, rests on a basis of faith, for it assumes the permanence and uniformity of natural laws – a thing which can never be demonstrated."

"Any act often repeated soon forms a habit : and habit allowed, steadily gains in strength. — At first it may be but as the spider’s web, easily broken through, but if not resisted it soon binds us with chains of steel."

"Hell is truth seen too late — duty neglected in its season."

"True humility is not an abject, groveling, self-despising spirit ; it is but a right estimate of ourselves as God sees us."

"There is often as much independence in not being led, as in not being driven."

"Some men are born old, and some never seem so. If we keep well and cheerful we are always young, and at last die in youth, even when years would count us old."

"Sinful and forbidden pleasures are like poisoned bread; they may satisfy appetite for the moment, but there is death in them at the end."

"He that is possessed with a prejudice is possessed with a devil, and one of the worst kind of devils, for it shuts out the truth, and often leads to ruinous error."

"The prejudiced and obstinate man does not so much hold opinions, as his opinions hold him."

"Preventives of evil are far better than remedies; cheaper and easier of application, and surer in result."

"Sense, brevity and point are the elements of a good proverb."

"The certainty of punishment, even more than its severity, is the preventive of crime."

"Always have a book at hand, in the parlor, on the table, for the family ; a book of condensed thought and striking anecdote, of sound maxims and truthful apothegms. It will impress on your own mind a thousand valuable suggestions, and teach your children a thousand lessons of truth and duty. Such a book is a casket of jewels for your household."

"We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living."

"Right actions for the future are the best apologies for wrong ones in the past – the best evidence of regret for them that we can offer, or the world receive."

"Sin with the multitude, and your responsibility and guilt are as great and as truly personal, as if you alone had done the wrong."

"Ridicule may be the evidence of wit or bitterness and may gratify a little mind, or an ungenerous temper, but it is no test of reason or truth."

"It has been said that science is opposed to, and in conflict with revelation. But the history of the former shows that the greater its progress, and the more accurate its investigations and results, the more plainly it is seen not only not to clash with the latter, but in all things to confirm it. The very sciences from which objections have been brought against religion have, by their own progress, removed those objections, and in the end furnished full confirmation of the inspired Word of God.”"

"He is one of the noblest conquerors who carries on a successful warfare against his own appetites and passions, and has them under wise and full control."

"The first step to improvement, whether mental, moral, or religious, is to know ourselves – our weaknesses, errors, deficiencies, and sins, that, by divine grace, we may overcome and turn from them all."

"Whatever the place allocated us by providence, that is for us the post of honor and duty. – God estimates us not by the position we are in, but by the way in which we fill it."

"The highest attainment, as well as enjoyment of the spiritual life, is to be able at all times and in all things to say, 'Thy will be done.'"

"Thoroughly to teach another is the best way to learn for yourself."

"Temperance is to the body what religion is to the soul, the foundation and source of health and strength and peace."

"If rich men would remember that shrouds have no pockets, they would, while living, share their wealth with their children, and give for the good of others, and so know the highest pleasure that wealth can give."

"Anxiety is the poison of human life ; the parent of many sins and of more miseries. – In a world where everything is doubtful, and where we may be disappointed, and be blessed in disappointment, why this restless stir and commotion of mind? – Can it alter the cause, or unravel the mystery of human events?"

"Western civilization is passing through a social revolution unparalleled in history for scope and power. Its coming was inevitable. ...By universal consent this social crisis is the overshadowing problem of our generation."

"The social revolution has been slow in reaching our country. We have been exempt, not because we had solved the problems, but because we had not yet confronted them."

"The vastness and the free sweep of our concentrated wealth on the one side, the independence, intelligence, moral vigor, and political power of the common people on the other side, promise a long-drawn grapple of contesting forces which may well make the heart of every American patriot sink within him."

"The Church, the organized expression of the religious life of the past, is one of the most potent institutions and forces in Western civilization. ...It cannot help throwing its immense weight on one side or the other. If it tries not to act, it thereby acts; and in any case its choice will be decisive for its own future."

"Apart from the organized Church, the religious spirit is a factor of incalculable power in the making of history. In the idealistic spirits that lead and in the masses that follow, the religious spirit always intensifies thought, enlarges hope, unfetters daring, evokes the willingness to sacrifice, and gives coherence in the fight."

"Under the warm breath of religious faith all social institutions become plastic."

"The essential purpose of Christianity was to transform human society into the kingdom of God by regenerating all human relations and reconstituting them in accordance with the will of God. ...I have never met with any previous attempt to give a satisfactory historical explanation of this failure."

"The Church owns property, needs income, employs men, works on human material, and banks on its moral prestige. Its present efficiency and future standing are bound up for weal or woe with the social welfare of the people and with the outcome of the present struggle."

"I can frankly affirm that I have written with malice toward none and with charity for all. ...I have tried—so far as erring human judgment permits—to lift the issues out of the plane of personal selfishness and hate, and to put them where the white light of the just and pitying spirit of Jesus can play upon them. If I have failed in that effort, it is my sin. If others in reading fail to respond in the same spirit, it is their sin."

"In a few years all our restless and angry hearts will be quiet in death, but those who come after us will live in the world which our sins have blighted or which our love of right has redeemed."

"Let us do our thinking on these great questions, not with our eyes fixed on our bank account, but with a wise outlook on the fields of the future and with the consciousness that the spirit of the Eternal is seeking to distil from our lives, some essence of righteousness, before they pass away."

"I have written this book to discharge a debt. For eleven years I was pastor among the working people on the West Side of New York City. ...I have never ceased to feel that I owe help to the plain people who were my friends. If this book in some far-off way helps to ease the pressure that bears them down and increases the forces that bear them up, I shall meet the Master of my life with better confidence."

"History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same. It is always hungry for bread, sweaty with labor, struggling to wrest from nature and hostile men enough to feed its children. The welfare of the mass is always at odds with the selfish force of the strong."

"In so far as men have attempted to use the Old Testament as a code of model laws and institutions and have applied these to modern conditions, regardless of the historical connections, these attempts have left a trail of blunder and disaster. In so far as they have caught the spirit that burned in the hearts of the prophets and breathed in gentle humanity through the Mosaic Law, the influence of the Old Testament has been one of the great permanent forces making for democracy and social justice."

"We shall confine this brief study of the Old Testament to the prophets, because they are the beating heart of the Old Testament."

"To the ceremonial aspects of Jewish religion Jesus was either indifferent or hostile; the thought of the prophets was the spiritual food that he assimilated in his own process of growth. With them he linked his points of view, the convictions which he regarded as axiomatic. ...The real meaning of his life and the real direction of his purposes can be understood only in that historical connection."

"Primitive religions consisted mainly in the worship of the powers of nature. ...the essential thing in religion was not morality, but the ceremonial method of placating the god, securing his gifts, and ascertaining his wishes. He might even be pleased best by immoral actions, by the immolation of human victims, by the sacrifice of woman's chastity, or by the burning of the first born."

"Jehovah was the tribal god of Israel. Fortunately he was stronger and more terrible than the gods of the neighboring tribes, so that he was able to drive them out and give their land to his own people, but he was not fundamentally different from them and they were believed to be quite as real as Jehovah."

"Against this current conception of religion the prophets insisted on a right life as the true worship of God. Morality to them was not merely a prerequisite of effective ceremonial worship. They brushed sacrificial ritual aside altogether as trifling compared with righteousness, nay, as a harmful substitute and a hindrance for ethical religion."

"The Book of Isaiah begins with a description of the disasters which had overtaken the nation and then in impassioned words the prophet spurns the means taken to appease Jehovah's anger. "...Cease to do evil! Learn to do right! Seek justice! Relieve the oppressed! Secure justice for the orphaned and plead for the widow." (Isaiah I. 10-17.)"

"In so far as men believed that the traditional ceremonial was what God wanted of them, they would be indifferent to the reformation of social ethics. If the hydraulic force of religion could be turned toward conduct, there is nothing which it could not accomplish."

"Christian ritual grew up not as the appropriate and aesthetic expression of spiritual emotions, but as the indispensable means of pleasing and appeasing God, and of securing his favors, temporal and eternal, for those who put their heart into these processes. This Christian ceremonial system does not differ essentially from that against which the prophets protested; with a few verbal changes their invectives would still apply."

"The prophets were the heralds of the fundamental truth that religion and ethics are inseparable, and that ethical conduct is the supreme and sufficient religious act. If that principle had been fully adopted in our religious life, it would have turned the full force of the religious impulse into the creation of right moral conduct and would have made the unchecked growth and accumulation of injustice impossible."

"It is important to note, further, that the morality which the prophets had in mind in their strenuous insistence on righteousness was not merely the private morality of the home, but the public morality on which national life is founded. They said less about the pure heart for the individual than of just institutions for the nation."

"The twin-evil against which the prophets launched the condemnation of Jehovah was injustice and oppression."

"The religious ideal of Israel was the theocracy. But the theocracy meant the complete penetration of the national life by religious morality. It meant politics in the name of God."

"The prophets were not religious individualists. ...they always dealt with Israel and Judah as organic totalities. They conceived of their people as a gigantic personality which sinned as one and ought to repent as one. ...it was only when the national life of Israel was crushed by foreign invaders that the prophets began to address themselves to the individual life and lost the large horizon of public life."

"The prophets... interpreted past history, shaped present history, and foretold future history on the basis of the conviction that God rules with righteousness in the affairs of nations, and that only what is just, and not what is expedient and profitable, shall endure."

"Our modern religious horizon and our conception of the character of a religious leader and teacher are so different that it is not easy to understand men who saw the province of religion chiefly in the broad reaches of civic affairs and international relations."

"The words are part of the first chapter of Isaiah to which reference has been made. The prophet throughout the chapter deals with the national condition of the kingdom of Judah and its capital. ...he urges ...the abolition of social oppression and injustice as the only way of regaining God's favor for the nation. If they would vindicate the cause of the helpless and oppressed, then he would freely pardon; then their scarlet and crimson guilt would be washed away. The familiar text is followed by the very material promise of economic prosperity and the threat of continued war: "If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land; but if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword.""

"The sympathy of the prophets, even of the most aristocratic among them, was entirely on the side of the poorer classes. ...The edge of their invectives was turned against the land-hunger of the landed aristocracy who "joined house to house and laid field to field," till a country of sturdy peasants was turned into a series of great estates; against the capitalistic ruthlessness that "sold the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes," thrusting the poor free-man into slavery to collect a trifling debt; against the venality of the judges who took bribes and had a double standard of law for the rich and the poor."

"It became one of the fundamental attributes of their God that he was the husband of the widow, the father of the orphan, and the protector of the stranger. The widows and the fatherless were those who had no concrete power to back their claims, no "influence," no "financial interest," no "pull" with the police, judges and aldermen of that time. The "stranger" was the immigrant who had no part in the blood-kinship of the clan, and hence no share in the land and no voice in the common affairs of the village."

"When the prophets conceived Jehovah as the special vindicator of these voiceless classes it was another way of saying that it is the chief duty in religious morality to stand for the rights of the helpless."

"There is no question on which side the sympathy of the prophets was enlisted. Their protest against injustice and oppression, to the neglect of all other social evils, is almost monotonous."

"To the more judicial and scientific temper of our day their invective would seem overdrawn and their sympathy would seem partisanship. In Jeremiah and in the prophetic psalms the poor as a class are made identical with the meek and godly, and "rich" and "wicked" are almost synonymous terms."

"We are to-day in the midst of a revolutionary epoch fully as thorough as that of the Renaissance and Reformation. It is accompanied by a reinterpretation of nature and of history. The social movement has helped to create the modern study of history. Where we used to see a panorama of wars and strutting kings and court harlots, we now see the struggle of the people to wrest a living from nature and to shake off their oppressors. The new present has created a new past. The French Revolution was the birth of modern democracy, and also of the modern school of history."

"Eminent theologians, like other eminent thinkers, live in the social environment of wealth and to that extent are slow to see. The individualistic conception of religion is so strongly fortified in theological literature and ecclesiastical institutions that its monopoly cannot be broken in a hurry. It will take a generation or two for the new social comprehension of religion to become common property."

"The better we know Jesus, the more social do his thoughts and aims become."

"Men are seizing on Jesus as the exponent of their own social convictions. They all claim him. ...But in truth Jesus was not a social reformer of the modern type... he approached these facts purely from the moral, and not from the economic or historical point of view."

"If the question of the distribution of wealth were solved for all society and all lived in average comfort and without urgent anxiety, the question would still be how many would be at peace with their own souls and have that enduring joy and contentment which alone can make the outward things fair and sweet and rise victorious over change."

"Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master."

"The Christian movement began with John the Baptist. … in his recorded teaching to the people there is not a word about the customary ritual of religion, about increased Sabbath observance, about stricter washings and sacrifices, or the ordinary exercises of piety. He spoke only of repentance, of ceasing from wrongdoing. He hailed the professional exponents of religion who came to hear him, as a brood of snakes wriggling away from the flames of the judgment. ...The way to prepare for the Messianic era and to escape the wrath of the Messiah was to institute a brotherly life and to equalize social inequalities."

"Jesus accepted John as the forerunner of his own work. It was the popular movement created by John which brought Jesus out of the seclusion of Nazareth. He received John's baptism as the badge of the new Messianic hope and repentance. ...He drew his earliest and choicest disciples from the followers of John. When John was dead, some thought Jesus was John risen from the dead. He realized clearly the difference between the stern ascetic spirit of the Baptist and his own sunny trust and simple human love, but to the end of his life he championed John and dared the Pharisees to deny his divine mission. ...In the main he shared John's national and social hope. His aim too was the realization of the theocracy."

"The greatest of all prophets was still one of the prophets, and that large interest in the national and social life which had been inseparable from the religion of the prophets was part of his life too. The presumption is that Jesus shared the fundamental religious purpose of the prophets."

"Like all great minds that do not merely imagine Utopias, but actually advance humanity to a new epoch, he [Jesus] took the situation and material furnished to him by the past and molded that into a fuller approximation to the divine conception within him."

"The Greek world cherished no such national religious hope as the prophets had ingrained in Jewish thought; on the other hand it was intensely interested in the future life for the individual, and in the ascetic triumph over flesh and matter. Thus the idea which had been the centre of Christ's thought was not at all the centre of the Church's thought, and even the comprehension of his meaning was lost and overlaid."

"Ascetic Christianity called the world evil and left it. Humanity is waiting for a revolutionary Christianity which will call the world evil and change it."

"The fundamental purpose of Jesus was the establishment of the kingdom of God, which involved a thorough regeneration and reconstitution of social life."

"Primitive Christianity cherished an ardent hope of a radically new era, and within its limits sought to realize a social life on a new moral basis. Thus Christianity as an historical movement was launched with all the purpose and hope, all the impetus and power, of a great revolutionary movement, pledged to change the world-as-it-is into the world-as-it-ought-to-be."

"The organization in which this movement was embodied, after three centuries of obscurity and oppression, rose triumphant to be the dominant power of the civilized world. Christian churches were scattered broadcast over the Roman Empire. ...Its churches were endowed with the ancient properties and rights of the temples. Its clergy were given immunity from the taxes and exactions which crushed all other classes. Its members filled the civil service. Its great bishops had the ear of the men in power."

"When the machinery of [Roman] imperial administration broke down in the provinces under the invasion of the barbarians in the fifth century the machinery of the Church remained unbroken. ...Ancient families became extinct and the Church became the heir of their lands and slaves and serfs. Small proprietors sought security by committing their lands to the Church and becoming its tenants."

"The landed wealth of the Church alone sufficed to make it a power of the highest rank in the feudal system of the Middle Ages, in which all power finally rested on the possession of the land. Bishops and abbots became feudal dignitaries, sometimes almost sovereign princes in their own domains, and always with a potent voice in the government of their nations."

"The Church was the preserver of the remnants of intellectual culture, the sole schoolmistress of the raw peoples. Her clergy long had almost a monopoly of education, and were the secretaries of the nobles, the chancellors and prime ministers of kings."

"The Church had its own law code and its own courts of law which were supreme over the clergy, and had large rights of jurisdiction even over the laity, so that it could develop and give effect to its own ideas of law and right."

"Throughout the Middle Ages the sway of the Church over the moral and spiritual life of the people, her power to inspire and direct their enthusiasms and energies, her chance for molding their conceptions of life, were amazing and unparalleled by any other force."

"Christianity was rising when the ancient world was breaking down. By the time the Church had gained sufficient power to exercise a controlling influence, the process of social decay, like the breakdown of a physical organism in a wasting disease, was beyond remedy."

"Amid the general anarchy, against the coarse vice and brutality of the barbarians, herself harried by the rapacity of the nobles and weakened by the ignorance and barbarism of her own clergy, the Church did what she could, but a thorough social reconstruction was impossible. In modern life her power is broken by the prevalent doubt and apostasy, and the current of materialism and mammonism is now too great to be stemmed."

"Why has it [the Church] never done what it was sent to do? Others ...will say it has done so. Has it not lifted woman to equality and companionship with man, secured the sanctity and stability of marriage, changed parental despotism to parental service, and eliminated unnatural vice, the abandonment of children, blood revenge, and the robbery of the shipwrecked from the customs of Christian nations? Has it not abolished slavery, mitigated war, covered all lands with a network of charities to uplift the poor and the fallen, fostered the institutions of education, aided the progress of civil liberty and social justice, and diffused a softening tenderness throughout human life? It has done all that, and vastly more."

"The influence of Christianity in taming selfishness and stimulating the sympathetic affections, in creating a resolute sense of duty, a stanch love of liberty and independence, an irrepressible hunger for justice and a belief in the rights of the poor, has been so subtle and penetrating that no one can possibly trace its effects. ...And yet human society has not been reconstituted in accordance with the principles of Jesus Christ."

"We are apt... to forget that the moral force of Christianity was usually only one factor in producing such a change as the abolition of slavery or piracy, and that over against the benign influences of the Church must be set the malign and divisive influences which she created by persecuting zeal, intellectual intolerance, or religious wars. In short, we must soberly face the fact that a good many deductions have to be made from the popular panegyrics, and that the Church has not accomplished all that is often claimed for her."

"The social effects which are usually enumerated do not constitute a reconstruction of society on a Christian basis, but were mainly a suppression of some of the most glaring evils in the social system of the time."

"In general, the Church has often rendered valuable aid by joining the advanced public conscience of any period in its protest against some single intolerable evil, but it has accepted as inevitable the general social system under which the world was living at the time, and has not undertaken any thoroughgoing social reconstruction in accordance with Christian principles."

"The most important effects of Christianity went out from it without the intention of the Church, or even against its will."

"The position of woman has doubtless been elevated through the influence of Christianity, but... it is probably fair to say that most of the great Churches through their teaching and organization have exerted a conservative and retarding influence on the rise of woman to equality with man."

"Christianity has been one of the most powerful causes of democracy, but the conscious influence of the Church has more widely been exerted against democracy than for it."

"It is this diffused spirit of Christianity rather than the conscious purpose of organized Christianity which has been the chief moral force in social changes. It has often taken its finest form in heretics and free-thinkers, and in non-Christian movements. The Church has often been indifferent or hostile to the effects which it had itself produced. The mother has refused to acknowledge her own children."

"It is only when social movements have receded into past history... that the Church with pride turns around to claim that it was she who abolished slavery, aroused the people to liberty, and emancipated woman."

"We who know personal religion by experience know that there is nothing on earth to compare with the moral force exerted by it. It has demonstrated its social efficiency in our own lives."

"All social movements would gain immensely in enthusiasm, persuasiveness, and wisdom if the hearts of their advocates were cleansed and warmed by religious faith."

"But will reënforcement work the other way, also? Religion strengthens the social spirit; will the social spirit strengthen personal religion? When a minister gets hot about child labor and wage slavery, is he not apt to get cold about prayer meetings and evangelistic efforts? When young women become interested in social work, do they not often lose their taste for the culture of the spiritual life and the peace of religious meditation?"

"If this is indeed the alternative, we are in a tragic situation, compelled to choose between social righteousness and communion with God."

"Personal religion has a supreme value for its own sake, not merely as a feeder of social morality, but as the highest unfolding of life itself, as the blossoming of our spiritual nature. Spiritual regeneration is the most important fact in any life history. A living experience of God is the crowning knowledge attainable to a human mind."

"If, therefore, our personal religious life is likely to be sapped by our devotion to social work, it would be a calamity second to none. But is it really likely that this will happen? The great aim underlying to whole social movement is the creation of a free, just, and brotherly social order. This is the greatest moral task conceivable. Its accomplishment is the manifest will of God for this generation. Every Christian motive is calling us to do it. If it is left undone, millions of lives will be condemned to a deepening moral degradation and to spiritual starvation. Does it look probable that we will lose our contact with God if we plunge too deeply into this work? Does it stand to reason that we shall go astray from Jesus Christ if we engage in the unequal conflict with organized wrong? What kind of ‘spirituality’ is it which is likely to get hurt by being put to work for justice and our fellow-men?"

"Some of the anxiety about personal religion is due to a subtle lack of faith in religion. Men think it is a fragile thing that will break up and vanish when the customs and formulas which have hitherto encased and protected it are broken and cast aside. Most of us have known religion in one form, and we suppose it can have no other. But religion is the life of God in the soul of man, and is God really so fragile?"

"Personal religion collapses with some individuals, because in their case it had long been growing hollow and thin. ... In reality there was little personal religion to lose, and that little would probably have been lost in some other way."

"A new factor enters the situation when we encounter the influence of ‘scientific socialism.’ It is true, the party platform declares that ‘religion is a private affair.’ The saving of souls is the only industry that socialism distinctly relegates to private enterprise."

"The socialism of continental Europe, taking it by and large, is actively hostile, not only to bad forms of organized religion, but to religion itself."

"We have to harmonize the two facts, that wealth is good and necessary, and that wealth is a danger to its possessor and to society. On the one hand property is indispensable to personal freedom, to all higher individuality, and to self-realization; the right to property is a corollary of the right to life; without property men are at the mercy of nature and in bondage to those who have property. On the other hand property is used as a means of collecting tribute and private taxes, as a club with which to extort unearned gain from laborers and consumers, and as the fundamental tool of oppression."

"Not until 1948, when I entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, did I begin a serious intellectual quest for a method to eliminate social evil...I came early to Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis, which left an indelible imprint on my thinking by giving me a theological basis for the social concern which had already grown up in me as a result of my early experiences. Of course there were points at which I differed with Rauschenbusch. I felt that he had fallen victim to the nineteenth-century "cult of inevitable progress" which led him to a superficial optimism concerning man's nature. Moreover, he came perilously close to identifying the Kingdom of God with a particular social and economic system-a tendency which should never befall the Church. But in spite of these shortcomings Rauschenbusch had done a great service for the Christian Church by insisting that the gospel deals with the whole man-not only his soul but his body; not only his spiritual well-being but his material well-being. It has been my conviction ever since reading Rauschenbusch that any religion that professes concern for the souls of men and is not equally concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried."

"I am increasingly convinced that one of humankind's most grievous sins is our anthropocentrism. By cutting ourselves off from the rest of creation, we are left bereft of awe and wonder and therefore of reverence and gratitude. We violate our very beings, and we have nothing but trivia to teach our young."

"The essence of our nature is to give birth, not to destroy. To create. We see this in the love of mother and child and in the love of artist for his or her art. The dilemma is that the very powers we possess for creativity can just as easily become employed to destroy with."

"There is no academic virtue in playing mediocre football and no academic vice in winning a game that by all odds one should lose...There has indeed been a surrender at Notre Dame, but it is a surrender to excellence on all fronts, and in this we hope to rise above ourselves with the help of God."

"We firmly believe in the natural equality of man; we believe the people are independent. Sovereign, if you please. As far as a nobility, hereditary, or otherwise are concerned, we are grounded and settled in belief that 'all men are created equal'."

"I believe that the love of freedom and the hatred of oppression under-girds and vitalizes the whole republican movement. The principles of our fathers in regard to human liberty and equality still live in the hearts of their descendants, and will find appropriate expression and suitable exponents."

"If the Bible sanctions slavery at all, it is the enslavement of white men. No one pretends that the servants spoken of in the Bible were blacks. The Roman slave was not a black man, the Hebrew slave was not a black man. The question is, whether the laboring man, white or black, may rightfully be enslaved."

"Now, what about this negro equality of which we hear so much, in and out of Congress? It is claimed by the Democrats of today, that Jefferson has uttered an untruth in the declaration of principles which underlie our government. I still abide by the democracy of Jefferson, and avow my belief that all men are created equal. Equal how? Not in physical strength, not in symmetry of form and proportion, not in graceful of motion, or loveliness of feature, not in mental endowment, moral susceptibility, and emotional power. Not socially equal, not of necessity politically equal. Not this, but every human being equally entitled to his life, his liberty, and the fruit of his toil. The Democratic Party deny this fundamental doctrine of our government, and say that there is a certain class of human beings which have no rights. If you maliciously kill them, it is no murder. If you take away their liberty, it is no crime. If you deprive them of their earnings, it is no theft. No rights which another is bound to regard. Was there ever so much diabolism compressed into one sentence? Why do |the Democrats come to us with their complaints about the negroes? I for one feel no responsibility in the matter. I did not create them; was not consulted."

"Now, if there is anyone dissatisfied with the fact, that there is a whole race of human beings, with the rights of human beings, created with a skin not colored like our own, let him go mouth the heavens, and mutter his blasphemies in the ear of the God that made us all. Tell him that he had no business to make human beings with a black skin. I repeat, I feel no responsibility for this fact. But, inasmuch as it has pleased God to make them human beings, I am bound to regard them as such. Instead of chattering your gibberish in my ear bout negro equality, go look the son of God in the face and reproach him for favoring negro equality because he poured out his blood for the most abject and despised of the human family. Go settle this matter with the God who created and the Christ who redeemed."

"No human being, black or white, bond or free, native or foreign, infidel or Christian, ever came to my door, and asked for food and shelter, in the name of a common humanity, or of a pitying Christ, who did not receive it. This I have done. This I mean to do, as long as God lets me live."

"I will never degrade my manhood, and stifle the sympathies of human nature. It is an insult to claim it. I wish I had nothing worse to meet at the judgement day than that. I would not have the guilt of causing that wail of man's despair or that wild shriek of woman's agony, as the one or the other is captured, for all the diadems of all the stars in heaven."

"Is it desired to call attention to this fact? Proclaim it upon the house-tops! Write it upon every leaf that trembles in the forest! Make it blaze from the sun at high noon and shine forth in the radiance of every star that bedecks the firmament of God. Let it echo through all the arches of heaven, and reverberate and bellow through all the deep gorges of hell, where slave catchers will be very likely to hear it. Owen Lovejoy lives at Princeton, Illinois, three-quarters of a mile east of the village, and he aids every fugitive that comes to his door and asks it. Thou invisible demon of slavery! Dost thou think to cross my humble threshold, and forbid me to give bread to the hungry and shelter to the houseless? I bid you defiance in the name of my God."

"I will stand where I please."

"I know that this is a pro-slavery rebellion, for it is nothing else. Slavery and rebellion are identical and freedom and loyalty are identical, and those slave-holders who are truly loyal will soon become abolitionists, for that is the logic of their position and they will see as I see, that slavery must perish and pro-slavery men will be secessionists."

"I poured on a rainstorm of fire and brimstone as hot as I could, and you know something of what that is. I believe that I never said anything more savage in the pulpit or on the stump."

"The Republican Party, of which I am a member, stands pledged since 1856 to the extermination, so far as the federal government has the power, the twin relics of barbarism, slavery, and polygamy. They have this power in the territories of the United States."

"Sir, than robbery, than piracy, than polygamy, slaveholding is worse. More criminal, more injurious to man, and consequently more offensive to God. Slaveholding has been justly designated as the sum of all villainy. Put every crime perpetuated among men into a moral crucible, and dissolve and combine them all, and the resultant amalgam is slaveholding. It has the violence of robbery."

"I am speaking in dead earnest, before God. God's own truth. It has the violence of robbery, the blood and cruelty of piracy. It has the offensive and brutal lusts of polygamy, all combined and concentrated in itself, with aggravations that neither one of these crimes ever knew or dreamed of."

"The justification of slavery is placed, so far as I know, mainly upon these grounds. The inferiority of the enslaved race, the fact that enslaving men imparts Christianity and civilization to them, and thirdly, the guarantees of the Constitution. These are the three main arguments presented to justify slavery, and consequently to justify its expansion, and by the way, I hold that the extreme men, as they are called, on this question, are the only men who have the logic of it. I am right or the fire-eaters or right. If slavery is right in Virginia, it is right in Kansas. If it is wrong in Kansas, it is wrong everywhere."

"In regard to the first point, the inferiority of the enslaved race. We may concede it is a matter of fact that it is inferior, but does it follow, therefore, that it is right to enslave a man simply because he is inferior? This, to me, is a most abhorrent doctrine. It would place the weak everywhere at the mercy of the strong. It would place the poor at the mercy of the rich. It would place those who are deficient in intellect at the mercy of those that are gifted in mental endowment."

"The principle of enslaving human beings because they are inferior, is this. If a man is a cripple, trip him up. If he is old and weak, and bowed with the weight of years, strike him, for he cannot strike back. If idiotic, take advantage of him, and if a child, deceive him. This, sir, this is the doctrine of Democrats and the doctrine of devils as well, and there is no place in the universe outside the five points of hell and |the Democratic Party where the practice and prevalence of such doctrines would not be a disgrace."

"Nobody can intimidate me."

"You say this is horrid. I know it is horrid. I know it is horrid to hold men in slavery. I know it is horrid to doom four million human beings to condition of chattels."

"The testimony of all religious societies in the slave states is that the slaves are heathen and it is an utter impossibility to Christianize them and civilize them by this process."

"The third point that is relied on to justify slaveholding is, that it is Constitutional. That is guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. I have heard it declared over and over again that the Constitution guarantees slavery. I deny it. In no article, in no section, in no line, in no word, in no syllable, can there be any recognition of the word 'slave' or 'slavery'. Why, sir. When I came up to take the oath to support the Constitution, a whispered buzz, half in earnest and half jocular, passed around. How can Lovejoy swear to support the Constitution? How can he take the oath? I could take the oath to support the Constitution, because I believe in the Constitution, because I hold to it, because my heart is loyal to it. Every part and parcel and portion of it, I believe in. But, I do not believe in the construction put upon it by those who claim its recognition and sanction of the practice of slaveholding."

"In truth, I swore to support the Constitution because I believe in it. I do not believe in their construction of it. It is as well known as any historical fact can be known, that the framers of the Constitution so worded it as that it never should recognize the idea of slave property. From the beginning to the ending of it."

"But the advocates of slavery have affirmed a strange doctrine in regard to the Constitution. They think that because I swore to support the Constitution, I swore to support the practice of slaveholding. Sir, slaveholding in Virginia is no more under the control or guarantee of the Constitution than slavery in Cuba, or Brazil, or any other part of the world is under the control or guarantee of the Constitution. Not one principle."

"I always defended it and always will, whether it be against the Democrats who pervert it, or the dis-unionists who trample on it."

"I always defended the Constitution, because it was for liberty. It was ordained by the people of the United States. Not by a superannuated old mummy of a judge, and a Jesuit at that, but by the people of the United States. To establish justice, secure the blessing of liberty for themselves and their posterity, and to secure the natural rights of every human being within its exclusive jurisdiction. Therefore, I love it. These men can perceive nothing in the Constitution but slavery."

"I warn you, be careful and consider the consequences of your vote."

"The estimation of the Democratic Party is iniquity!"

"The Republican Party is for positive intervention. They propose, as our fathers did, to erect a wall of intervention, of prohibition, and station an angel of liberty at the gates in that wall, who shall keep watch and ward there day and night, and guard the territories against the entrance of slavery, as the cherubim of God kept sin out of Eden."

"So far as my right to life and liberty is concerned, I did not get it from Congress or Parliament. I did not get it from the Democratic Party. I did not get it from any evil spirits whose names commence with the same initials as the Democrats."

"Democracy says that the popular vote can take right away and once taken away the act is sanctioned and upheld by all laws, human and divine. I deny it. I say it is a wrong, however it is perpetuated. Why, mothers. What do you care how you are robbed of your babe? The question is not how it is done, the outrage is that it is done at all. No matter whether it is done by an individual or a conspiracy of many individuals in a community agreeing and concerting according to the forms of law. If the poor babe is torn from your heart, that is the unspeakable wrong. Not the manner in which it is perpetrated."

"You say they have the right of property in their slaves. Suppose they have, how sacred is this right of property? I want to argue the moral question of it. How sacred is this right of property in the living bodies and souls of men? Just as sacred as it is in a horse? Just as sacred as the tenure of property in a mule? Suppose it is, you own them. As you own a horse or mule. Is the right of property in a horse more sacred than my life? Is the right of property in a mule more sacred than my right to free speech? I tell them, and I tell the people all over the country, if they have a system of an institution that will not allow me to live or speak or read my papers, or worship my God as I please, then I say in God's name that thing must die. My rights I will have!"

"Now comes the objection which you hear in the mouths of Democrats everywhere. Negro equality! Negro equality! The "Black Republicans" are in favor of negro equality!"

"The doors will be forever barred and bolted against those miserable Democrats who scoff the rights of man."

"I love the Constitution. It is enshrined in my heart. I love it better than any dozen Democrats in the land do tonight."

"The equality of the human race is the pivot upon which our government rests and resolves."

"We thank thee for the wisdom of the fathers in the formation of this government, and for the assistance thou didst render them in arriving at the great principles relating to the equality of man. We thank thee for the glorious declaration."

"The Constitution is a piece of rotten parchment that ought to be trodden under foot."

"To the day of his death, it would scarcely wrong any other to say, he was my most generous friend."

"Let him have his marble monument along with the well assured and more enduring one in the hearts of all those who love Liberty unselfishly and for all."

"Owen Lovejoy was a major political figure in his day whose reputation over time has suffered from neglect."

"My banner is Evangelical Truth, Apostolic Order."

"There is much to weep about. But it is a sin to permit our tears to drown out our song of gratitude and joy in the gift of creation."

"The most dangerous Communism [...] is the wolf in sheep's clothing of conservatism who bent upon preserving the policies of greed."

"Our government still upholds one of the worst evils of decadent capitalism, namely, that production must be only at the profit for the owners, for the capitalist, and not the laborers."

"If Congress fails to back up the President in his monetary program, I predict a revolution in this country which will make the French Revolution look silly!"

"Must the entire world go to war for 600,000 Jews in Germany who are neither American, nor French, nor English citizens, but citizens of Germany?"

"From European entanglements, from Nazism, communism and their future wars, America must stand aloof. Keep America safe for Americans and the Stars and Stripes the defender of God."

"Roosevelt has a poor brand of Russian communism … I think it is significant the leaders among the communists of the world never once attacked international bankers. Roosevelt will not touch that subject."

"If Jews persist in supporting communism directly or indirectly, that will be regrettable. By their failure to use the press, the radio and the banking house, where they stand so prominently, to fight communism as vigorously as they Nazism, the Jews invite the charge of being supporters of communism."

"[W]e shall barter our sovereignty as a free, independent nation or accept the decisions of a World Court as a super-nation to manage our affairs… While we sympathize with the Serbian or the Russian, with the Jew in Germany or the Christian in Russia, the major portion of our sympathy is extended to our dispossessed farmer, our disconsolate laborers who are being crushed at this moment while the spirit of internationalism runs rampant in the corridors of the Capitol, hoping to participate in setting the world aright while chaos clamors at our doors."

"One thing is sure. Democracy is doomed. This is our last election. It is fascism or communism. We are at the crossroads—I take the road to fascism."

"I am beginning to understand why I have been dubbed a 'Nazi' and or a 'fascist' by the Jewish publications in America; for practically all the 16 principles of social justice are being put into practice in Italy and Germany."

"I oppose modem capitalism because by its very nature it cannot and will not function for the common good. In fact, it is a detriment to civilization."

"At any rate I was persuaded by a lot of gentlemen, important gentlemen around the country, to get up an organization for the purposes of indoctrinating the people with the principles of social justice. That was it. It wasn't political, although you can't prove it wasn't political. If you’re indoctrinating anybody today, you’re in politics."

"When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing."

"I have dedicated my life to fight against the heinous rottenness of modern capitalism because it robs the laborer of this world's goods. But blow for blow I shall strike against Communism, because it robs us of the next world's happiness."

"I believe in nationalizing those public resources which by their very nature are too important to be held in the control of private individuals."

"I am not boasting when I say to you that I know the pulse of the people. I know it better than all your newspaper men. I know it better than do all your industrialists with your paid-for advice. I am not exaggerating when I tell you of their demand for social justice which, like a tidal wave, is sweeping over this nation."

"Following this preamble, these shall be the principles of social justice towards the realization of which we must strive:… I believe that every citizen willing to work and capable of working shall receive a just, living, annual wage which will enable him both to maintain and educate his family according to the standards of American decency."

"I believe in upholding the right to private property but in controlling it for the public good."

"I believe that, in the event of a war for the defense of our nation and its liberties, there shall be a conscription of wealth as well as a conscription of men."

"In this nation there is ample room for everyone to profit according to his merit provided he is willing to work. Henceforth our national motto shall be ‘security for all.’ Henceforth our laws will be so written and so executed that financial privileges for the few shall disappear. This is what is meant when Mr. Roosevelt said: "Among our objectives I place the security of the men, women and children of the Nation first." These words indicate the philosophy which will guide our President during his tenure of office. It is the philosophy of social justice which is about to vanquish the sophistry of greed and of individualism."

"Let them heed the words of the President that "we have undertaken a new order of things". Let them be cautious, henceforth, because only at their own personal peril will they dare obstruct the rising of this sun of social justice which will not set until the new economic system will have been perfected."

"In a sense, gentlemen, grant that Machiavelli was right. Grant that Machiavelli his genius when he said that by their very nature the masses require a strong hand and a superior brain to rule them and to exploit them."

"If I own a shotgun that is no argument why I may kill my neighbor’s child. If I own a factory that is no argument why I may starve the laborers to make profits and profits only for the stockholders. All property is subject to control."

"I believe that, in the present state of human society, it is advisable that the hourly wage contract should be abolished. In its stead legislation would be passed by which the laborer would receive an annual wage which would enable him to live in decently and according to the American standard."

"The representatives of labor should have a voice in the management of the business."

"Are you for the old deal with its industrial dictatorship and its doctrine of laissez faire-ism or are you for a new deal whereby the government shall legislate against unfair competition, against concentration or profits in the hands of stockholders?"

"Modern capitalism violates right order because it so employ the working of wage earning classes as to divert business and economic activity to its own advantage without any regard to the human dignity of the workers, the social character of economic life, social justice, and the common good."

"From modern capitalism, as from a poisoned fountainhead, there flows that stream of detestable internationalism, by which the Warburgs, the Rothschilds and the Morgans dominate affairs not only in America but also in the Central Banks of Europe… It is an internationalism which cares not for the righteousness of social justice or of sound philosophy, but is willing for the protection of its private property, to become a bed-fellow with the harlot of the ages."

"We maintain that it is not only the prerogative but it is also the duty of the government to limit the amount of profits acquired by any industry."

"We maintain the principle that there can be no lasting prosperity if free competition exists in industry. Therefore, it is the business of government not only to legislate for a minimum annual wage and maximum working schedule to be observed by industry, but also to curtail individualism that, if necessary, factories shall be licensed and their output shall be limited."

"I mean that you have been constantly deceived. Are you not aware that this so-called democratic country of ours has been controlled by the capitalist and the plutocrat? Have you not learned through bitter experience that no political party seriously cares for your welfare. The mockery of your vote was all that counted. I mean that you have been victims of class legislation—of legislation designed to protect the rich and the property rights of the rich; legislation which sneered at the poor and at human rights."

"Nor does the concept of the Fascist or Nazi dictator appeal to the American liberty loving citizen with his traditional love for democracy and republican institutions which bar both Nazism and Fascism."

"[I] couldn't honestly take back much of what I said and did in the old days when people still listened to me. The press ignored it at the time [...] but [the] real reason I couldn't take any more of Roosevelt was because he recognized the atheistic, godless government of the Communists in Russia."

"I could have bucked the Government and won — the people would have supported me. But I didn't have the heart left, for my church had spoken. It was my duty to follow, for disobedience is a great sin."

"Then, too, there was Father Coughlin. "I take the road of Fascism," he said in 1936, before forming the Christian Front, whose members referred to themselves as "brown shirts." His virulently anti-Semitic radio program, regularly transmitting claims from the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion, reached almost 30 million Americans at its height—the largest radio audience in the world at the time. Those listeners tuned in at the end of 1938 as Coughlin was justifying the violence of Kristallnacht, arguing that it was "reprisal" against Jews who had supposedly murdered more than twenty million Christians and stolen billions of dollars in "Christian property"; Nazism, he said, was a natural "defense mechanism" against the communism financed by Jewish bankers. Coughlin’s weekly newspaper, Social Justice, which had an estimated circulation of 200,000 at its height, was described by Life magazine at the time as probably the most widely read voice of "Nazi propaganda in America.""

"You go to Japan. Japan had 250 missionary boards at one time, ministering in Japan. All kinds of Christian institutions, Christian ministries all over, and it is a totally Pagan culture. On the other hand, you go to China and you're going to find several hundred million Christians in a country where Christians were massacred. Why is that? Because that's a purifying process. Hypocrites all abandon religion; they're not going to be phony for something that costs them their life."

"The world will accept you changing your style for them, but pretty soon they’re going to demand that you change your substance. They’re going to demand that you – well, they liked the fact that you’ve taken their method, but they're going to demand you change your message."

"[P]eople who say, “I am an agnostic,” proudly. From the Greek, “one who doesn’t know.” They do, “I’m an agnostic.” You hear people say that. You know what the Latin word for “agnostic” is? Ignoramus. You hear anybody say, “I am an ignoramus”? Really?"

"You would be better off, frankly, to use the name of Jesus Christ or God in an occasional curse word than to live an ongoing, hypocritical life that blasphemes His name from beginning to end."

"The sinner must feel far worse before he ever has a right to feel any better."

"You hear people say, “Well, I’m an agnostic.” Really? You shouldn’t be proud to be an agnostic because the Latin equivalent is ignoramus. It’s the same word. I’ve never heard anybody say, “I’m personally an ignoramus.” But if you don’t know, you don’t know. That’s what an ignoramus is. If you have an open mind close it, would you please, before you destroy yourself. Close it."

"I deplore racism and all the cruelty and strife it breeds. I am convinced the only long-term solution to every brand of ethnic animus is the gospel of Jesus Christ. In Christ alone are the barriers and dividing walls between people groups broken down, the enmity abolished, and differing cultures and ethnic groups bound together in one new people... It is a startling irony that believers from different ethnic groups, now one in Christ, have chosen to divide over ethnicity. They have a true spiritual unity in Christ, which they seem to disdain in favor of fleshly factions."

"In God’s eyes – listen – no one is a victim. We are all perpetrators of open rebellion, scandalous, blasphemous sin against God. We are all rebels, we are all obstinate, we are all stubborn... Here we have the critical fundamental principle of the gospel; no one is a victim. From God’s viewpoint, no one is a victim."

"Those who have the disease called Jesus will never be cured."

"The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable."

"Do the truth quietly without display."

"Our huffing and puffing to impress God, our scrambling for brownie points, our thrashing about trying to fix ourselves while hiding our pettiness and wallowing in guilt are nauseating to God and are a flat denial of the gospel of grace. Our approach to the Christian life is as absurd as the enthusiastic young man who had just received his plumber’s license and was taken to see Niagara Falls. He studied it for a minute and then said, "I think I can fix this.""

"God not only loves me as I am, but also knows me as I am. Because of this I don’t need to apply spiritual cosmetics to make myself presentable to Him. I can accept ownership of my poverty and powerlessness and neediness."

"When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer."

"To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God’s grace means."

"My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it."

"Sheer scholarship alone cannot reveal to us the gospel of grace. We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of KNOWING Jesus Christ personally and directly. When the religious views of others interpose between us and the primary experience of Jesus as the Christ, we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing out brochures to places we have never visited."

"The deeper we grow in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the poorer we become – the more we realize that everything in life is a gift. The tenor of our lives becomes one of humble and joyful thanksgiving. Awareness of our poverty and ineptitude causes us to rejoice in the gift of being called out of darkness into wondrous light and translated into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son."

"The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior. Suddenly I discover that I am ministering to AIDS victims to enhance my resume. I find I renounced ice cream for Lent to lose five excess pounds… I have fallen victim to what T.S. Eliot calls the greatest sin: to do the right thing for the wrong reason."

"Jesus was victorious not because he never flinched, talked back, or questioned, but having flinched, talked back, and questioned, he remained faithful."

"What makes authentic disciples is not visions, ecstasies, biblical mastery of chapter and verse, or spectacular success in the ministry, but a capacity for faithfulness. Buffeted by the fickle winds of failure, battered by their own unruly emotions, and bruised by rejection and ridicule, authentic disciples may have stumbled and frequently fallen, endured lapses and relapses, gotten handcuffed to the fleshpots and wandered into a far county. Yet, they kept coming back to Jesus."

"Faithfulness requires the courage to risk everything on Jesus, the willingness to keep growing, and the readiness to risk failure throughout our lives."

"I have been seized by the power of a great affection."

"Whenever I allow anything but tenderness and compassion to dictate my response to life"

"The Christ within who is our hope of glory is not a matter of theological debate or philosophical speculation. He is not a hobby, a part-time project, a good theme for a book, or a last resort when all human effort fails. He is our life, the most real fact about us. He is the power and wisdom of God dwelling within us."

"To affirm a person is to see the good in them that they cannot see in themselves and to repeat it in spite of appearances to the contrary. Please, this is not some Pollyanna optimism that is blind to the reality of evil, but rather like a fine radar system that is tuned in to the true, the good, and the beautiful."

"None of us has ever seen a motive. Therefore, we don’t know we can’t do anything more than suspect what inspires the action of another. For this good and valid reason, we’re told not to judge."

"The tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who they might become."

"My message, unchanged for more than fifty years, is this: God loves you unconditionally, as you are and not as you should be, because nobody is as they should be. It is the message of grace... A grace that pays the eager beaver who works all day long the same wages as the grinning drunk who shows up at ten till five. A grace that hikes up the robe and runs breakneck toward the prodigal reeking of sin and wraps him up and decides to throw a party no ifs, ands, or buts... This vulgar grace is indiscriminate compassion. It works without asking anything of us... Grace is sufficient even though we huff and puff with all our might to try to find something or someone it cannot cover. Grace is enough... Jesus is enough."

"Growth and eating are antagonistic."

"Every action, physical or psychical, involves either integration or disintegration."

"There is no more antagonism between growth and reproduction than between growth and thought, growth and muscular activity, growth and breathing."

"The antagonism is only that of action and reaction, which are but two phases of the same process—opposing phases which exist everywhere, and which must exist, or action itself cease, and death reign universally."

"If it could be shown that men or women who are the parents of many children have thereby lost something of individual power, we might then be forced to admit that the greater cost related to the reproductive system in women must be at their personal expense, not at the expense of the nutriment which they assimilate and eliminate."

"Every action, physical or psychical, involves either integration or disintegration; every use of faculty belongs to the latter class. There is no more antagonism between growth and reproduction than between growth and thought, growth and muscular activity, growth and breathing."

"Other things being equal, the law seems to be directly reversed."

"One activity initiates another; the largest individual force maintains those more active adjustments, "simultaneous and successive," between the internal and external, which indicate the most vigorous life. We must look, then, to something more than a direct antagonism, between growth and reproduction, to account for unlikeness's of the sexes in plant or animal."

"Nature's sturdiest buds and her best-fed butterflies belong to this sex; her female spiders are large enough to eat up a score of her little males; some of her mother-fishes might parody the nursery-song, "I have a little husband no bigger than my thumb.""

"If women normally have equal appropriative powers with men, the surplus nutriment not needed for their smaller physiques may be constitutionally handed over to reproduction. Natural selection has originated an admirably complete system of related provisions to this distinct end. This fact must lead us to the conclusion that the aggregate of feminine force is the full and fair equivalent of all masculine force, physical or psychical."

"Whenever man does not interfere, monogamy seems to be the general order of Nature with all higher organisms."

"The warlike duty of defense is also borne chiefly by males, and must often be an immense tax on the energies."

"In women, if there is a greater arrest of individual growth than in men, the difference begins in the fœtal life; their comparative weight and size at birth are the same as at maturity; and, if the former finish their growth earlier, it must be because relatively they grow more rapidly."

"When Elizabeth Blackwell studied medicine and put up her sign in New York, she was regarded as fair game, and was called a "she doctor." The college that had admitted her closed its doors afterward against other women; and supposed they were shut out forever. But Dr. Blackwell was a woman of fine intellect, of great personal worth and a level head. How good it was that such a woman was the first doctor! She was well equipped by study at home and abroad, and prepared to contend with prejudice and every opposing thing."

"Lucretia Mott has been a preacher for years; her right to do so is not questioned among Friends. But when Antoinette Brown felt that she was commanded to preach, and to arrest the progress of thousands that were on the road to hell; why, when she applied for ordination they acted as though they had rather the whole world should go to hell, than that Antoinette should be allowed to tell them how to keep out of it. She is now ordained over a parish in the state of New York, but when she meets on the Temperance platform the Rev. John Chambers, or your own Gen. Carey, they greet her with hisses. Theodore Parker said; “The acorn that the school-boy carries in his pocket and the squirrel stows in his cheek, has in it the possibility of an oak, able to withstand, for ages, the cold winter and the driving blast.” I have seen the acorn men and women, but never the perfect oak; all are but abortions. The young mother, when first the newborn babe nestles in her bosom, and a heretofore unknown love springs up in her heart, finds herself unprepared for this new relation in life, and she sends forth the child scarred and dwarfed by her own weakness and imbecility, as no stream can rise higher than its fountain."

"We must all – all of us – work diligently to revitalize out sacred liturgical worship, especially through more frequent and widespread celebrations of the Traditional Latin Mass. We need the mighty sustenance of the older rites, which we crafted in tougher times and polished like treasured jewels for centuries and lovingly handed down by forebears to their children who knew, as life had taught them, that hard times were ahead."

"It’s not unreasonable that people are becoming angry because they’re seeing that the bishops are overreacting in certain circumstances, but what they need to do, they need to see, instead of being angry, that this is a sign that God’s calling us to pray for them, because being angry with them isn’t going to help them. Praying will."

"The Church therefore requires that the priest practice custody of the eyes, an integral part of modesty: we should never let our eyes fall on anything that would distract us from God or lead us into sin."

"I never made an absolute statement about the things because I didn’t feel I was qualified. I hadn’t studied the phenomena and that sort of thing. All I did was report the things that I saw and whether I would make a statement one way or another wouldn’t make any difference because I just don’t think I was qualified to do so."

"I saw it right after it came out. I went with Father Bowdern and I thought it was a typical Hollywood, glitzy thing, real bizarre, trying to bring people to be fearful or to scream. I was disappointed with it. I thought it was a mess. And Father Bowdern did too. He gave sort of a running negative commentary throughout the whole movie. I thought the two of us were going to be thrown out of the theatre."

"All the saints say that you must have a deep devotion to Our Lady to be a saint. Medieval chivalry and medieval Marian devotion go hand in hand. A man must always live, work, and pray as if he were under the gaze of a Mother."

"Against the false claim of that good-willed but misled pastor, Saint Thomas Aquinas can be easy, simple, and accessible to any Catholic who is able to read. I am so convinced of this that I earned my Ph.D on the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, and I have made it is my life goal to make the world “a more Thomistic place.""

"The world needs holy men today, especially fathers–both biological fathers and spiritual fathers, priests and bishops. Today many men are confused about what it means to be a man, a husband, and a father. Addictions to pornography and entertainment (especially sports) have consumed the lives of men around the world. Furthermore, for those who want to try and break free of the cycle of cultural brain-washing, education and career systems have been put in place to beat down any traditional understanding of strong male leadership, determining and classifying traditional manhood as toxic. This has left many men feeling emasculated and adrift in a society that views their fatherhood and leadership as dispensable. We need St. Joseph to serve as the model for men (fathers, husbands, and clergy) today. From St. Joseph they learn to be servant leaders, sacrificial and chivalrous men not afraid to confront the darkness, slay spiritual dragons, and combat the politics of death. If St. Joseph is the Terror of Demons (and he is), all men are called to resemble him and also be a terror to the forces of evil."

"If my experiences define me, then that’s who I am. Or if I’ve chosen the wrong thing, if I’ve gone down this path that I shouldn’t have gone down—if my experiences define me, then that’s who I am. But I can be defined by something more, by my origin, by the fact that I’ve been made on purpose by a God who loves me, and am defined by my end, which is that I am made to live with that God forever and that I’ve been created on purpose. If I’m a Christian, I’ve been recreated as a son or daughter of God himself, and so even if my experience or even my story has a lot of brokenness in it—and I think a lot of ours do—and even if my experience or my story has a lot of pain or attraction to whatever, it doesn’t matter. My identity is not that. And I can rise above that. I can live it. It’s part of my story, but that’s not the end of my story."

"I have often asked myself: “Why has Jesus let all of this happen?” The only answer that comes to mind is that Jesus wants to manifest just how weak is the faith of many within the Church, even among too many of her bishops. Ironically, your pontificate has given those who hold harmful theological and pastoral views the license and confidence to come into the light and expose their previously hidden darkness. In recognizing this darkness, the Church will humbly need to renew herself, and so continue to grow in holiness."

"If someone came along and said that you or I were not human, we don’t want the law to make them believe we’re human. We want the law to protect our lives no matter what they believe. They have the freedom to believe what they want, and that’s what the pro-life movement is saying. These babies in the womb are identifiably, undeniably, scientifically human beings and, therefore, they should be protected by the law."

"It’s like, "Hey the house is on fire!" I’m not going to ask anybody’s permission to go scream that the house is on fire... that’s the distinction that I would make."

"You have the SSPX problem of taking decrees and doctrinal pronouncements from the people that they theoretically recognize as the Pope have to pass in review in front of the Superiors of the Society who decide which of them are in accord with Tradition and which are not. This was the idea of sifting – the French word was cribler – they do the sifting. And, that seems like a pretty dead end to me, because I don’t see that anywhere in a Catholic theology book. We know that the Church can’t defect. It’s contrary to the nature of the Church. But we know that the Church does not cease to exist when you don’t have a Pope for a while, not even for a long time. There’s no theologian who says that."

"It is hard for me to even conceive of the traditional movement without Father Cekada. Together we made a good team, each contributing the preservation and defense of the Catholic Faith against the onslaughts of the modernists."

"It could be that the army group here was recalled to help out in El Salvador because the war there is now picking up in intensity. This whole Central American area is in the process of change and if the Governments don't want to do it peacefully, then it will be done by war. It is sad but it has to happen. I haven't been able to confirm the report that the army did move out. Just say a prayer on occasion that we will be safe and still able to be of service to these people of God."

"He was an ordinary man who was a good steward of the gifts God gave him. He cultivated those gifts, those natural talents. They were not necessarily the kinds of talents one would have identified as those of a future saint, but he used those gifts that God gave him faithfully and generously and allowed the Lord to lead him. He said, “Yes” to the promptings of grace in his life and was very generous in his response. So God calls all of us to be holy. All of us are called to sanctity. But the path that each of us walks is uniquely ours."

"I’m grateful to the Church for recognizing him. I’m proud of him for not giving up, meeting his daily challenges and trusting in God’s promise to give him eternal life. Stanley was one who lived simply, gave his best, and I’m sure has heard the Lord say to him, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”"

"From Nowheresville Oklahoma to Heavensville Heaven, it's amazing."

"The second key to this study is the phenomenon of deliberate falsification of history as part of the enslavement of others. It is generally agreed, even by the Franco-Latin nobility, that the civilization of the Roman Empire was Hellenic in its inception. But this same nobility claims that this Romano-Hellenic Civilization changed into a Western Civilization in the 8-9th centuries in Western Europe and into a Byzantine Civilization in the East at about the same time. But what had really happened was that the Franco-Latins had reverted to a period of sheer barbarity under the leadership of the Carolingian Franks which up until recently was still being called the "Dark Ages." How else can one describe France, for example, in 1789 when 85% of her population were still serfs and villains guarded from escape by 40,000 castles. How can such a France be better described than part of the Dark Ages. It can, of course, be made to look like a civilized society only when history is controlled by the aristocracy and the middle class of 13% which still keep this so-called "free" 85% in abject slavery to history as written by themselves."

"Unleash The Gospel is not a numbers game. It's about falling in love with the one who loves us, and that's a person-by-person change."

"Philosophy of science can bring a strong array of analytical and synthetic tools to questions of ultimate causation, ultimate reality and “the whole of reality” because these questions are both physical and metaphysical—entailing methodological procedures from both science and philosophy."

"I’ll just simply say we haven’t done any apologetics in a concerted fashion since Vatican II. I don’t know why. I’m still trying to figure this out myself—why did apologetics became a bad word, why did it become a reflection of some kind of inauthenticity of faith? We’ve somehow drifted into a Kierkegaardianism—we have to take a leap of faith across an infinite chasm. But I’ve never thought that at all! I luckily had great teachers who believed reason and faith came from the same source, with God never intending us to jump over an infinite chasm."

"We want parents and teachers to regularly have conversations with young men and women about God's plan for their lives. These should be ordinary conversations; otherwise, when the topic of vocations comes up, it seems like something arcane, unfamiliar, or mysterious."

"I've been through a lot of life's changes, but it's always my faith that I've been able to fall back on; that I draw strength from. I come from a family of Christians, also a long military tradition. So, faith in our family has always sustained us as a family, but also as individuals. It's because of that upbringing, because of that trust, that there is something greater than myself"

"To me it is really beautiful and it really expresses the catholicity of the Church, that the people have embraced the faith as something that is truly theirs, something that is truly meaningful to them. They don't look upon it as something foreign, as something coming from the outside."

"The Catholic Church, and our Catholic faith, is the answer to this darkness and bringing people into relationship with Jesus and teaching the dignity of the human person are the best ways of changing people’s attitudes and changing their behavior"

"The priest as a man needs to be courageous enough to welcome his masculinity, embrace it, and express it in a balanced way. Ironically, the priest who’s not able to do this is prone to lapsing into one of two destructive extremes. He may either repress his masculinity and become “wishy-washy” and indecisive, feeling guilty and apologizing for his maleness, or he may fall into the other extreme, becoming aggressive, power-hungry and domineering. Becoming a mature male means being comfortable with one’s masculinity, not needing to hide it or exaggerate it. We ought not to apologize for being a man. At the same time, we should not use our masculinity as a weapon."

"I make decisions consultatively with others, not in a vacuum, and I know in doing so I'm listening to the Holy Spirit and to those who advise me to look out for God's people. I really compare it to being a parent in a family. Sometimes parents have to make unpopular decisions that might not be understood by everyone in the family, and they might be disliked for a while, but I think parents have to make decisions for the good of the whole family."

"People think that I have more power than I do. As the archbishop, I have to live not by "fiat" or by decree, but I have to live by gathering the people of God. Some people say that all I have to do is say it to be done, but it doesn't work that way. It is a position for great responsibility within the Church, but it is a ministry of the Church. I think that any power that I exercise has to be exercised with humility and in the light of the Gospel."

"When I get asked the question, "When did you know you wanted to be a priest?," many times I say "This morning." Every day you have to wake up and say, "God, what are you calling me to do today?" The layers of lived experience is what brings us to an appreciation for what we’re called to do in that moment."

"Everything we do as a church these days needs to have as its heart a desire of evangelization. Every conversation about how we pray together in the liturgy, how we do faith formation — whether it’s in our Catholic schools or in our parish religious education programs, RCIA, adult formation — all of that has to ask the question: "How are we using these things to evangelize, to bring others to Jesus Christ?""

"I don't think that it's my role as a bishop, to run around and judge. It's rather to run around and invite people into a relationship with Jesus. The Lord accepted people for who they are, and where there are, and tried to lead them to a better life, to lead them to a life that was more holy, a life that was more filled with His love and mercy. A life that was not self-centered, but self-giving. That's the example he showed to us. At times, the church needs to be a voice in the public square, but the church's voice should never be dictated by the public square."

"Freedom, the most distinctively human and humanizing of all gifts, becomes in human history a temptation to power and self-centeredness - just the opposite of what we need and are made for. The very gift that makes us most human and after which we most deeply yearn is the very cause of so much human pain and deterioration, for unless we use this freedom for our own good and the good of one another, we end up making one another slaves."

"The ethics of the Church and the fundamental human ethics are the same thing, they are linked. Therefore, my appeal is that we treat these farmworkers as we treat other workers in the State of New York, with the same dignity, simply because they are human beings. They are entitled to the same kind of protections that other workers in the State of New York have."

"One's whole life can be caught up in this attitude with the result that the quality of life is destroyed. The high-school student waits for graduation; the college student waits for graduate school; the graduate student waits for a job; the worker waits for a vacation; the vacationer waits to go back to work; the veteran worker waits for retirement. Our whole life can be spent waiting for what comes next. Then death intervenes and in a way it can be said that we never really existed, because we never found time to do something for its own sake; that is to say, we never played."

"The cornerstone role is a real challenge. But you can be certain that if you are gay or lesbian the Holy Spirit is calling you to take some steps in that direction, to be more open about your gayness, to be more open about the depth of your spiritual life. We must seek God's guidance because a cornerstone, after all, is a small, if essential, part of a building, the entirety of which is the work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit waits on our freedom to invite her in to make use of our gifts and talents in bringing about the reign of God, a reign of justice and peace, a reign where God's glory is achieved through the fullness of life that all humans share, gay and straight alike."

"John J. McNeill was a Jesuit for nearly forty years before being expelled from the Society of Jesus in 1987 for his views on gay and lesbian sexuality. Since 1975 he has practiced psychotherapy in New York City. The Church and the Homosexual, also available from Beacon Press."

"Civil war burst upon the United States, with almost the suddenness of the meteor's glare. It was, however, but like the eruption of the volcano, whose pent-up fires had, for ages, been gathering strength for the final explosion. The whirlwind which our country has reaped, is but the natural harvest of that seed which, for long years, we have been sowing."

"Popular prejudice is seldom removed by argument"

"Christianity had undermined all the temples of idolatry, and was enthroned as the established religion of the Roman empire. Ambitious men rallied about it as a great political power. Wicked men nominally embraced it as an essential step to worldly advancement. Christianity had thus, perhaps, more to fear from favoritism than from persecution. Unprincipled men, grasping at wealth and power, embraced Christianity merely as an instrument for the promotion of their own temporal aggrandizement. They hated its spiritual teachings, and endeavored to make it a religion of dead doctrines and of pompous ceremonies, rather than a rule to govern heart and life. They crucified Christianity while crowning it."

"War is the science of destruction."

"We give thanks for what has happened in the early years, a sign of the Holy Spirit, we live in the present with enthusiasm and we look forward with hope to the future. Arguments, hatred, jealously are the work of the devil, while peace is the way of Christ. Noro, with its different denominations, cultures and customs is a sign of hope for sharing the Good News with all."

"The work of a missionary is to put yourself out of the job."

"Parents tell me about their children and say, "Basketball is his life," or "Skiing is her life" but at a deeper level as Catholics we say, "Christ is my life," and so the athletes and every Catholic need to be integrating that relationship into their activities — sports or otherwise."

"The monastery is a house of prayer, study, and hospitality, a place in which they can await the return to Christ, the Spouse, in order to participate in the Heavenly Banquet."

"It has been a work in progress (the Lord gently leading) that I have noticed ever since I lost interest in being either a cowboy or a fireman. My image of the priesthood has grown with me and continues to grow."

"I wrote Thank God for Evolution! mostly to help religious believers from different traditions move toward an evidential worldview without having to abandon their tradition and join the atheist/humanist camp to do so. ...Few things are more important... than for... of religious believers... to embrace a science-based understanding of the world. ...Trying to understand reality without an evolutionary worldview is like trying to understand infection without microscopes or the structure of the universe without telescopes. It's... impossible."

"I dedicate this book to the glory of God."

"I promise that this book will provide... an experience of science, and evolution specifically, that will fire your imagination, touch your heart, and lead you to a place of deep gratitude, awe, and reverence."

"You will... find here effective ways to talk about evolution to any friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors who are biblical literalists or young earth creationists."

"To agnostics, humanists, atheists, and freethinkers... you will find nothing here that you cannot wholeheartedly embrace as... rationally sound, mainstream scientific understanding of the Universe. ...[T]he vision of "evolutionary spirituality" presented here will benefit you and your loved ones without your needing to believe in anything otherworldly."

"Discussing Thank God for Evolution! with those you care about will open new doors of possibility... and provide common ground where none existed before. This book is a perfect gift, not to convert others to your way of thinking but to converse... deeply and heartfully about those things that matter most."

"I met Connie Barlow at a lecture... Connie was the author of four books, and two of them had "evolution" in their titles... She, too, was a long-time "epic of evolution" enthusiast. ...[H]er passion for sharing a sacred understanding of cosmic history was no less than mine. Seven months later I asked Connie to marry me."

"Connie was a self-described atheist, and her professional life was steeped in the sciences. My life was devoted to religion. Our union embraces both."

"[W]e were watching... Evolution: A Journey into Where We Came From and Where We're Going. ...episode ..."What About God?" It examined the struggle that conservative Christian college students face in trying to embrace both evolution and a pre-evolutionary interpretation of their faith. ...Connie ...said, "You need to be out there talking to those students. ...to show how an evolutionary understanding can enrich one's faith!" ...A few weeks later, after a frustrating day at work, I told her (not really serious...) "...I wish we could travel non-stop, teaching and preaching the Great Story ..." Her response... "I'd love to do that!""

"[W]e chose to display on our van both a Jesus fish and a Darwin fish—kissing. A retired biology professor... laughed, "Oh great! Now you piss everyone off!""

"God's gift of science reveals that our faith traditions are... meaningful and grounded in undeniable reality... When we focus... on points of broad consensus rather than... legitimate disagreement, conflicts... lose their grip."

"[T]he fact that our Universe has been transforming along a discernible path for billions of years—the fact that creation was not a one-time event—is of little or no dispute. ...[T]his undeniable fact ...makes me want to shout from the mountaintops: "...The war is over!""

"Traditional religions have played crucial roles in fostering cooperation within each tribe, kingdom, and early nation—though not infrequently by provoking suspicion and enmity of those outside the group. ...[T]o fulfill their potentials in our postmodern world, each will have to harmonize its core doctrines with the evolutionary world view. ...[T]he evolutionary outlook bolsters their core teachings. Instead of an intrusion... a precious blessing."

"Evolutionary versions of each religion... are emerging. ...[A]dherents of each religion have discovered ...Religious insights and perspectives freed from the narrowness of their time and place of origin are more comprehensive and grounded in measurable reality ...Evolution does not diminish religion; it expands its meaning and value globally."

"[M]any... believers have rejected evolution because... [it] has been depicted as random, meaningless, mechanistic, and Godless. The growing edge of evolutionary thinking... points to a very different understanding... a... realistic picture of divine creativity. ...a Universe astonishingly ...suited for life and ...consciousness."

"Scientists... are moving away from a mechanistic... way of thinking and into an emergent, developmental worldview. Evolution... can be embraced as God glorifying and Christ edifying."

"The ancient religious paths are aching for coherence with the great discoveries born of the quest to understand this... Universe, the living world, our evolved selves, and... our innermost psyches."

"[M]y intent is to help you see what I see—science and religion can be mutually enriching."

"[F]or... over 99 percent of human history—there is little evidence that any culture understood developmental time and space... remotely similar to... today. Nevertheless, the big cosmological questions demanded answers, and so the answers came. ...Orally transmitted stories would evolve—until (and if!) they were written down and declared to be the unchanging revelation of God. When a story becomes scripture, it ceases to evolve."

"School textbooks, unfortunately, sometimes render science as dogmatic as any fundamentalist doctrine. In truth, science is quintessentially open to revision and discovery."

"[W]hat a difference it makes to be groping our way forward in faith—in partnership with God, or, should you prefer less traditional terminology: trusting the Universe... Reality... Time."

"So long as religious and political leaders continue to ignore our evolutionary heritage, and thus do not put in place structures of internal and external support that can withstand the high dosages of that high status and power necessarily confer, then there will be no hope for a less calamitous future."

"Understanding the unwanted drives within us as having served our ancestors for millions of years is far more empowering than imagining that we are the way we are because of inner demons, or because the world’s first woman and man ate a forbidden apple a few thousand years ago. The path to freedom lies in appreciating one’s instincts, while taking steps to channel these powerful energies in ways that will serve our higher purposes."

"No otherworldly, unnatural paradise can compare with the utterly REAL heaven I now experience... every moment of every day, free of resentment, guilt, and unfinished business. ...By genuinely appreciating my instincts—thanks to the evolutionary world-view—and creating... structures of support, I now, by grace, experience an ease and freedom I've never known before regarding old habits, patterns, and temptations."

"[L]et me slip into pride or arrogance, deception or inauthenticity, blame or resentment, or stingy, ungrateful self-centeredness, and I won't have to worry about burning in some otherworldly hell after I die. I'll be supping with Satan right here and now."

"May I continue to have the humility, strength, and peer encouragement to do what is necessary to remain in this state of grace. May I be a blessing to those around me. May I leave a positive evolutionary legacy, in service to God. And may the light of the living Christ shine within my heart and continue to guide my steps."

"Each and every human being who has ever brought anything of beauty, value, or importance into the world has done so only because... impregnated or in-spirited by some aspect of Beauty, Truth, Love, or other attributes of God. This... is beyond comprehension, beyond... force or free will. ...as if some power greater than ourselves is at work. ...There is a sense of having served, like Mary, as a vessel for something ...greater than our own capacities. ...[[[w:Peak experience|P]eak experience]]s are religious moments ...The story of Jesus's conception can remind us of such miracles in our ...lives."

"Thanks to our fresh understanding of the deep-time face of grace, science and religion... are ushering each other into greatness."

"Denial gets a bad wrap, because denial is instinctual."

"Denial is the largely unconscious habit of thought whereby we refuse to accept the reality of things that are bad or upsetting—or that challenge our world view, our legacy, how we live, what is required of us, and/or our feelings of self-worth or superiority."

"Denial is also the instinctual impulse to reject or discount information that calls into question our hopes, assumptions, or expectations about the future."

"We all have denial instincts... so we... can have compassion for ourselves and for each other... [D]enial often gets a bad wrap. It's often just adaptive inattention."

"The stability of the biosphere has been in decline for centuries and in unstoppable collapse for decades. This "Great Acceleration" of technology and market-driven ecocide is an easily verifiable fact... [A]ll you have to do is Google "Great Acceleration.""

"Evidence is also compelling that the vast majority... will deny this, especially those benefiting from the existing order, those legitimately concerned about the consequences of collapse, and those who fear that accepting reality means "giving up." ...Virtually all of us fit that paragraph ..."

"The history of more than 80 previous boom and bust societies... reveals how and why Homo colossus is destined for near-term extinction."

"Homo colossus is Willam Catton's term for "industrial" humanity. That's where each of us uses 20-50 times the resources, and exudes 20-50 times the waste as Homo sapiens."

"[P]aradoxically, "hope-free" collapse acceptance may be the only thing that can help us not make a bad situation worse—and live fully, fearlessly, and deeply meaningfully, even at TEOTWAWKI."

"Collapse is when a gradual downward trend in biophysical health and wellbeing goes into unstoppable decline; runaway, out of control; etc., it's... abrupt climate change... like 10,000 years of climate change in half a human lifetime. ...This is known as "The Great Acceleration" of Biospheric Collapse."

"At any measuere, absolutely everything that humans rely on... is now in precipitous free fall, unstoppable."

"[I]f you Google "Great Acceleration" you see all these wonderful charts... socioeconomic trends and earth system trends... everything going up. ...[W]e naturally think going up means better. Oh no, because the things... are ecocidal trends... and earth system collapse measures [respectively]."

"[S]ocioeconomic trends: population, motor vehicles, fertilizer constumption, tourism, river dams, etc., ...are the drivers of biosphere collapse. ...These are ecodidal trends and... earth system collapse trends."

"The 's health has been in decline for one or two centuries, and in runaway collapse... for decades... The Great Acceleration of Gaian Collapse."

"Any measurement, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide... We're losing all of the ice of the world... The oceans, the plankton, the corals, the fish, , oceanic dead zones and deoxygenation... and , the amount of soil, the fertility of the soil, the moisture of the soil, and permafrost is releasing tons of methane... unstoppable."

"[W]e are now in a mass extinction... [T]here's only been one mass extinction in the past that we've lost the insects and the forest, and we're now adding carbon dioxide, methane and notrous oxide faster than then..."

"[H]opium is a comforting vision of the future that requires breaking the laws of physics, biology or ecology, such as thinking that we can slow, stop or reverse The Great Acceleration of Gaian Collapse."

"Unstoppable collapse... These extinction level tipping points... thresholds that are already in the rear view mirror. Loss of the world's ice... I consider Dahr Jamail's The End of Ice... my favorite book on climate change. If you only read one book on climate change this year, read that..."

"When most of the ice is gone, the serious global warming begins. ...[L]earn about phase change and ... [W]hen you've got a glass of water, as long as the ice is in there, even if the sun's beating on it, it stays at 32°. Once the ice is gone the temperature goes skyrocketing!"

"Methane belching from the permafrost, the deep and shallow seas, hydrates and clathrates, tropical wetlands.. as well as the millions of wells."

", , and... abrupt non-linear ... ... verified that even if every human being went extinct tonight, stopping emissions immediately, we'd still see 25 to 40 ft of sea level rise in the next two centuries."

"Much insight and wisdom has been assembled in these pages. Take what you like and leave the rest, as the saying goes. And there is a lot to like, much to learn, experiments to be modified and adapted, and a refreshingly creative attempt to take the drama of the constructive engagement of religion and science from the Ivory Towers into the popular culture."

"The message is laid out in Dowd’s book, "Thank God for Evolution"... Dowd presents evolution as a sacred epic of emerging complexity that can be seen as "14 billion years of grace." He sidesteps the question of whose grace... although the book’s title offers a hint. ...[H]e’s not talking about an intelligent designer. Instead, he exhorts his audience to supplant or complement their individual notions of God with sometimes-fuzzy concepts like “cosmic creativity.”"

"The administrator part of being a bishop doesn't frighten me or scare me. What gets to me more than anything else is the emotional separation from people you have ministered to for so long. And the memories of those who have passed on and who had a big impact on my ministry here."

"Aspiring to be President of the United States, televangelist Pat Robertson preaches, "The Constitution of the United States, for instance, is a marvelous document for self-government by the Christian people. But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society. And that's what's been happening." If any statement is more anti-American and more contrary to the Christian gospel, I have yet to hear it."

"Hear a statement by the founder of the Moral Majority, and now a new movement, the so-called Liberty Movement, the Reverend Mr. Jerry Falwell, "The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country." People, the very foundation and fabric of our nation is really being threatened more by these popular religious voices, mesmerizing millions by way of television, than any threat of communism has ever presented us."

"This is your Mother Earth speaking today on behalf of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood-sisterhood of our common family. I am speaking to you Christian Americans in particular. You along with other citizens are raping me. There is not one among you who is altogether innocent, no not one. You have become so accustomed to abusing me for profit, jobs, luxuries, conveniences, and pleasures that it has become a natural way of life for you. It isn't that you intend to be malicious; it is only that you are thoughtless. But thoughtlessness doesn't clear you in a court of justice."

"The ruination of your environment respects no human-drawn borders nor any family's fenced in private property ... All of you, my citizens, are very interdependent. Each must learn to care for all, and all must learn to care for each. Not to love your neighbor as yourself is to surely perish."

"Unless you allow the world of nature to flourish, you will perish."

"You Christians ought to be most highly motivated to practice environmental stewardship. If you are accountable to God for every idle word you speak, do you think you are going to be held any less accountable for everything you waste and all that depletes God's good creation?"

"You Christians are called upon to balance your quest for personal salvation with reverence for nature. Either you live for the common good of all, or you live for no good or God at all!"

"And who is it that always suffers from the affluent people's overkill and superfluity but the poor again. You are making a wider and wider gap on the earth between the rich and the poor. And that is always a far greater threat to our national and international security than any nuclear arms race."

"You and I are destroying God's good earth that sustains us - biting the hand that feeds us. We are fighting God's natural systems in our determination to keep increasing our gross national product. In order to be comfortable, make as much money as we can, have it as easy as possible, and enjoy more pleasures now, we are leaving our children's children a wilderness that will not sustain them."

"Crises get our attention, but only love for God and his earth will hold our attention and move us to saving action."

"Would God be concerned with saving a soul, only to have that reborn person live in an impoverished and unhealthy environment? Salvation is a word that means "wholeness." Christ claimed that he came so that everyone might have life more abundantly. Christ's salvation includes the wholeness of the creature and the creation."

"Secular environmentalists have grounds to blame the Christian forces for the idea of life that will be good after death that they have ignored the consequences of people's irresponsibility with earth."

"Until we Christians see that the Gospel's good news of redemption applies to the earth, as well as the earthling, we will proliferate the sin of raping God's good earth. God's work of redemption in Jesus Christ encompasses the whole of creation and provides the grounds for restoring the brokenness in the relationship of humankind to creation, and the relationship of both to God."

"We must reclaim a sense of reverence for the earth and a recognition of our essential relatedness to the earth."

"Only love for God and God's good earth will keep our attention and move us to commitment. Nature is rising up to judge us Nature is striking back to call us to repentance."

"Healing and saving the creation is God's work, and he calls faithful persons to be co-creators with him."

"Mr. Truman excised the best of the Good Neighbor policy when he sent the very first civil rights message to the Congress of the United States and desegregated the Armed Forces. Folks, I think on this day in honoring Mr. Truman with that civil rights move, we need to all acknowledge the fact that we do have our prejudices, systemic prejudices, within each one of us. When we will honestly acknowledge those prejudices that we have, when we're in touch with those feelings, then it is that we can begin to discipline ourselves to love our neighbors with different pigments, and cultures, and races, and yes economics."

"If we love God, we can't help but love our neighbors because we're going to respect them as our brothers and sisters. In fact, folks, if you stop to think about it, the only way in this world any of us has of loving God is by loving our neighbors."

"The deepest religious concern on this earth today is being a good neighbor. The most crucial political issue in the world today is learning how to do rightly neighbor-with-neighbor. The greatest social urgency is learning how to be a good neighbor to one another. And certainly the most crucial concern of our global economy, call it economic justice, is caring about our neighbors simply the same way we care about ourselves."

"Now if the greatest single power in a democratic republic is the power of a single vote, then the greatest power any human being has on this earth is love. Love for God. Certainly, love for self. And love for our neighbor. And when I talk of love today, I'm not talking of that simple, sentimental, otherworldly, ethereal kind of love. I'm thinking of a kind of love with which God loves every last one of us. It's the kind of love that transforms the human personality. It addresses the will. And it molds the human mind. And the love of which I speak today actually instills holy habits even in the least of us."

"Now honest down-to-earth tough love is the only virtue that I know of that's guaranteed never to fail. We often fail loving, but love never fails."

"Good neighborliness is really the common denominator by which we can all live together in harmony in a world of difference. Love is the only thing that tears down those walls that tend to separate us neighbor from neighbor, and bridges all the gaps between religions, races, cultures, and economies."

"The wonder of spontaneous, tough-hearted, uncalculated, discipline, and unexpected love, that's living. True kindness never stops for one moment to calculate the cost of time, of money, of inconvenience, or even danger, but jumps to the aid of a neighbor, even an enemy. Love for neighbor is ever ready. And once we get it going, it keeps going and going and going."

"You know, if you and I would really want to make a real difference in this world today, to make a real difference for God and good, all we need to do is to learn how, and to begin to discipline ourselves, to treat our neighbors just the way we treat ourselves, would want to be treated. It's that simple and it's that difficult."

"I want all to know that if I disappear from the scene, because the bush is vast and hyenas many, that I am not planning any accident, nor, God forbid, any self-destruction. Instead, I trust in a good guardian angel and in the action of grace."

"Who in Kenya is desperate to kill Father Kaiser, and why now? They could only be powerful people who saw him as a moral thorn in their evil flesh."

"The unfashionable faith is the very one to attract worldly people on their first awakening to spiritual sensibility. The show of worldliness is then, to the worldly, particularly offensive. "The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life," delight in abasing themselves before rags and filth, wishing to reach the opposite extreme. The graces of the religious character, humility, meekness, self-accusation, contrition, find in associations with the coarse, the hard, the repulsive, their fittest expression. Hence it was that Judaism, heretofore the faith of the despised, became the faith of the despisers."

"If it be asked why Judaism, then, was not made the religion of the empire, instead of Christianity, which it hated with all the fervor of close relationship, the answer is at hand: Judaism laid no emphasis on its cosmopolitan features, and discouraged belief in the historical fulfilment of its own prophecy."

"The last three decades have vindicated 20 centuries of Catholic teaching about marriage and the family like never before. It's great to belong to a Church that’s right when the world is wrong!"

"I would hope that people see me as a shepherd and that people will grow to trust me. Trust is important in our life together, and I want to do what I can to establish trust. As for how I would like people to understand me, I would appreciate people recognizing that my task is to establish, along with the clergy and lay faithful, a vision for our future in southern Illinois. A key responsibility I have is to foster and preserve unity among us as we move into the future."

"I think questions should be welcome, because the only way that people will learn is asking questions. Now, there are two ways of asking questions: one is staking out a claim and another is genuinely seeking an answer."

"[The] ark was to be the central sanctity in the ritual worship of the Hebrews, during their wanderings in the wilderness. You may ask, "What have we to do to-day with that structure designed for barbarous fugitives in the Arabian desert three thousand years ago? Why lead us back from the fresh light of this morning to the misty dawn of history for a theme of meditation?" We have this to do with it, — that your new pulpit is in the direct line of descent from the first mercy-seat that consecrated the Jewish tent near Horeb. Those ten commandments, which are at the basis of our modern religion, were folded up and deposited beneath the lids of the ark in the first tabernacle that was built after the revelation from Sinai, more than thirty centuries ago. The Jews are our religious grandfathers... The first Christian churches were modelled after the synagogues; still keeping their reading-desks for the Old Testament, and adding the manuscript biographies of Jesus and the fresh letters of the apostles. When the Roman Catholic form was perfected, the simple reading-desk was supplanted by the more stately and imposing altar for the celebration of the mass. But the Protestant Reformation, appealing more directly to the reason and conscience, made the pulpit most prominent in the furniture of the church, and restored the Old and New Testaments as the basis of instruction and the sole authority. Thus this pulpit, in a young Protestant church in Boston, is connected by subtle historic ties, that reach across the ocean from the New World to the Old."

"We could not keep in mind that it was celestial fire we were looking at, — fire cool as the water-drops out of which it was born, and on which it reclined. It lay apparently upon the trees, diffused itself among them, from the valley to the crown of the ridge, as gently as the glory in the bush upon Horeb, when "the angel of the Lord appeared unto Moses in a flame of fire, out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.""

"It is of the very essence of true patriotism to be earnest and truthful, to scorn the flatterer’s tongue, and strive to keep its native land in harmony with the laws of national thrift and power. It will tell a land of its faults, as a friend will counsel a companion; it will speak as honestly as the physician advises a patient; and if occasion requires, an indignation will flame out of its love, like that which burst from the lips of Moses when he returned from the mountain, and found the people to whom he had revealed the holy and austere Jehovah, and for whom he would cheerfully have sacrificed his life, worshipping a calf."

"The great question which should determine the essential truth of any religion is the practical one, — What can it do for man? Does it provide for his weakness? does it meet his needs? does it educate and satisfy his spiritual nature? If it does all these perfectly, it must have been made for man, and it must be true, unless God is a deceiver, and the soul itself an organized cheat."

"The world is suffering. In large part, its misery comes from a lack of a sense of God. The role of the Pope is to point people towards God who is the source of love and truth. With openness to the Transcendent... public life can become active and fruitful, and society, even a global society, can be transformed for the good."

"If you have understanding, then you can build trust. If you have trust, you can build community and have respect for people's dignity."

"Scripture is not seen as primarily a written norm, but rather a consecration of the History of Salvation under the species of the human word. The content and unity of Scripture does not refer to the books of the Scriptures themselves but to the reality to which these books give testimony and witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ."

"A Franciscan, he reflected the deep faith and true Christian charity of St. Francis. We will all miss his kindness and support."

"I'm a firm believer in giving people a message to take away that they can that they can work on for that day — that if you're trying to overload the message then you're going to lose people. I believe in precision — shooting one arrow, not 50."

"If we understand the Faith, then we can explain the Faith. And after nearly half a century of failed catechesis, our people are unable to do that, and they don't even remember what some of the answers are, or even that the Church has the answers. So the secret is not just preaching the Word, but preaching the Word to those who claim to be Catholics, and giving them adequate formation to share the Faith."

"We are trying to preach an experience and relationship with Jesus above all else. Many people don't know Jesus or about the Church he founded. A good homily feeds the hunger they have to know Him, and prompts them to go and learn more. Whatever the priest says should flow from his relationship with Jesus."

"Archbishop Spalding was a fine representative of the type of men who organized and developed the Church in the United States. To a strong faith he added sincere piety and tender devotion, to scholarship a high degree of administrative ability, and to his zeal for Catholicism a loyal interest in the welfare of his country."

"It is because their labors are undertaken in obedience to Divine inspiration that Religious Communities are able to render humanity a kind of service that is incomprehensible to unaided human reason. To fit themselves for such service men and women deliberately relinquish even the most legitimate pleasures of the human heart. They leave father and mother and kindred, they sacrifice the opportunity to make for themselves the home of their choice, that they may give their affection, their energy, their ability, their all, to God, in the person of His little ones, His sick, and His poor. They bind themselves by the three holy vows of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience — and the world looks on and does not understand, for to the world the ascetic life is folly, even though it was by the practice of these virtues that Christ redeemed the world."

"Under his guidance the diocese continues to grow steadily and healthily."

"The new prelate has evidently brought with him the same prudence, zeal, and administrative ability that marked his career as a priest, and his work thus far has already borne rich fruit."

"Economics, ethics, sociology, politics are drawn together by the complex problems of property and each has much to learn from the others."

"It is surprising (I would observe) to reflect how many forms of spirit and idol-worship are (to their degradation be it said) common with Malaysian and Caucasian. (See in our own periodicals, published presumably by bright-minded, clean-souled Christian philosophers, yes, see in these oracles of our fireside, advertisements of magicians, diviners, fortune-tellers, charm-workers, not to speak of other law breakers, whose mere self-interest seems to have dulled all true intellective sense.)"

"Where love is absent there can be no feast."

"I feel like one who has charge of a vessel. There are numbers of men aboard who work, one for one purpose and another for another purpose. He who guides the vessel has the whole credit, and still he but represents the whole. And so it is with him at the head of the diocese. If I have done anything for which I should take credit to myself, it is, as I say, owing to my clergy, and also to the laity. I have simply to hold the rudder strongly, give the vessel the right direction, and the winds and waves will carry it where I wish it to go. They simply require a hand to guide them and to restrain them."

"The Catholic Church is conspicuous in the United States. The number of her adherents, the wealth of her churches, the activity of her religious orders of men and women, her parochial schools, colleges, academies, and 'universities, her compact and widespread hierarchical organization, attract universal attention. Whether the observers be friends or foes, she cannot be and is not ignored. She is a huge fact in the life of the republic. Her present homogeneity is remarkable if we consider the various sources whence she sprang and the various elements of which she is composed."

"Join in prayer with the men and women who throughout history spread the Gospel and put into practice Christ's call to serve the last even in the toughest conditions."

"There are some who confuse the phrase "official State religion" with the idea that "minorities do not belong here.""

"The links between faith, the inherent dignity and rights of human beings, and a fair and peaceful society, were also understood by the founding fathers of the United States and these basic moral principles have shaped, over thousand of years, civilization."

"The early history of the diocese is intimately bound up with the truly heroic labours of Father O'Reilly, and foundations of many of the present parishes were the results of his missionary zeal."

"Impartial observers of Indian affairs admit that the greatest good accomplished for the Indian has been through the agency of religious schools, and particularly of Catholic schools, and it is in this cause the Bureau has done its best work."

"No region has experienced so great changes within the last fifty years as has Western Pennsylvania."

"No heresy has ever been so wholly and hopelessly false that it did not reflect at least some broken lights of truth. This we may rightly say of Socialism where truth and error, fact and fiction are forever blended in an indistinguishable confusion. What is good we must keep and perfect, what is wrong and evil we must relentlessly reject."

"Mexico is a land of contrasts. Tropical heat and perpetual snow; inordinate riches and abject poverty; aboriginal Indians and twentieth century millionaires; a constitution and a state of continual anarchy; superstitiously religious, and yet pagan and savage."

"To me it is an honor as well as a duty to defend him when so unjustly attacked, for in common with my fellow-Catholics all over the world I recognize in him the Vicar on earth of the Eternal Prince of Peace. I do not expect that my many non-Catholic friends will accept our belief, which is, however, so well grounded on the inspired words of Holy Scripture, regarding the Primacy of the Pope; but I would ask if it is too much to expect that they will do justice to his untiring efforts to secure peace and relieve some of the very distressing features of the war."

"The secular system of education is based largely on the theory that man is born for the State and that he derives his rights from the State. The socialist would have the State absorb all authority in the domain of learning and of industry, and there are many secular educators who would fain see the monopoly of education lodged in the power of the State. The Catholic system is based on the right of the parent, the right of the child, and a reasonable individualism."

"Although he was a self-educated — in contradistinction to a college-bred — man, yet he early attained to real scholarship in ecclesiastical learning. His knowledge of the Sacred Scriptures, which he read in their original Hebrew and Greek, and of the Fathers of the Church, also read in their Greek and Latin texts, was deep and accurate. From these pure sources of Christian truth he drew rich material for his unique preaching, his sermons portraying an originality of thought, a precision of language and an earnestness of delivery peculiarly his own. Moreover, his character of sterling honesty, his hatred of sham, his practices of mortification, sense of duty and many other virtues are even stronger."

"The practice of devotion to the dead is also consoling to humanity and eminently worthy of a religion which seconds all the purest feelings of the human heart."

"The fame of Sarbiewski is as wide as the world of letters."

"The first reason for reprinting this work is a moral one — namely, that the readers may see, from so illustrious an example, that loss of faith comes from loss of morals. The second reason is that non-Catholics, those "other sheep which are not of this fold," may return to the rich, green pastures which they left four hundred years ago, and which are still as rich, as green, because still watered by the perennial streams of the seven sacraments, just as in the days of Henry."

"We lay it down as an elemental principle of religion, that no large growth in holiness was ever gained by one who did not take time to be often and long alone with God. No otherwise can the great central idea of God enter into a man's life, and dwell there supreme."

"Have you never observed how free the Lord's Prayer is of any material that can tempt to subtle self-inspection in the art of devotion? It is full of an outflowing of thought and of emotion toward great objects of desire, great necessities, and great perils."

"The most intelligent hearers are those who enjoy most heartily the simplest preaching. It is not they who clamor for superlatively intellectual or aesthetic sermons. Daniel Webster used to complain of some of the preaching to which he listened. "In the house of God" he wanted to meditate "upon the simple varieties, and the undoubted facts of religion;" not upon mysteries and abstractions."

"God, save us from ourselves! We carry within us the elements of hell if we but choose to make them such. Ahaz, Judas, Nero, Borgia, Herod, all were once prattling infants in happy mother's arms."

"The translator, while in Rome in 1899, picked up a copy of the work in a book-store. He was attracted by the title, and still more by the table of contents. No book he had read on the subject seemed quite satisfactory. He began to read this, and was fairly carried away by its order, its precision, its luminous teaching, its deep spirituality and its common sense. When he had read it through, he put it aside for some months and then took it up again. It was even more instructive, edifying and delightful than when first read, thus fulfilling in a measure the conditions of a classic."

"We must remind our country that our Church has not only the unfailing deposit of revealed truth, but also a practical wisdom, made up from her experience in all the ages and all the nations of modern times; that her experience demonstrates that Godless education trains unprincipled citizens, who are their country's scourge, and, finally, her ruin, — that the only way to make a prosperous and happy state is to mould the individual and the family in the mould of Christian principles and virtue, for such as are the individual and the family, such also must be the nation."

"The records of this first three quarters of a century of the labors and achievements of our progenitors are worthy indeed in retrospect and we do right to chronicle them. Moreover, we are but following a Catholic ideal when we mark the memory of those years and honor the names of the valiant leaders and the loyal followers who have made our cause respected."

"It seems strange to us now, but it is a fact that the disciples never seemed to have realized the mission of their Master. To the last they hoped He would redeem Israel, not from its iniquities, but from the rule of a foreign power. When He died their faith in Him died too. It looked as if His cause was lost forever. Is it not strange that the enemies of Jesus remembered better than His followers the words He said? Yet, is it not the way of the world? The hatred of an enemy outlasts the love of a friend."

"You will certainly allow that there exists a God, and this God cannot be indifferent to the conduct and actions of his creatures."

"The Archbishop was himself as a rock, gentle, yielding, mossy on the surface; but beneath all that gentleness strength and power and immovability of principle were found."

"Much of the early history of Manchester is bound up in the records of the Diocese of Portland, of which it formed a part for twenty-nine years. Mass was first celebrated in New Hampshire as early as 1694, but the real history of Catholicity can hardly be said to begin until a century and a quarter later. So few were Catholics at first, that up to 1822 there were not enough families in the entire state to warrant the appointment of even one resident priest."

"The legislation of Moses! Let me ask, what other legislation of ancient times is still exerting any influence upon the world? What philosopher, what statesman of ancient times can boast a single disciple now? What other voice comes down to us, over the stormy waves of time? But this man is at this day — at this hour — exerting a mighty influence over millions; the whole Hebrew nation do homage to his illustrious name. Though the daily sacrifice has ceased, and the distinction of the tribes is lost, though the temple has not left one stone upon another, and the altar-fires have been extinguished long ago, still, wherever a Jew is found, — and they are found wherever the foot of an adventurer travels, — he is a living monument of the power which this great Hebrew statesman still has over the minds and hearts of his countrymen. And now let us take one glance at this prophet, at the close of a life so laborious and honored. Up to his one-hundred-and-twentieth year, his eye was not dim, nor had his strength abated. But now, when he stands almost on the edge of the promised land, his last hour of mortal life has come. To conduct his people to that land had been his daily effort, and his nightly dream, and yet he is not permitted to enter it, though it would never have been the home of Israel, but for him. He ascends a mountain to die, and there the land of promise spreads out its romantic landscape at his feet. There is Grilead, with its deep valleys and forest-covered hills; there are the rich plains and pastures of Dan; there is Judah, with its rocky heights, and Jericho, with its palm-trees and rose-gardens; there is Jordan seen from Lebanon downward, winding over its yellow sands; the long blue line of the Mediterranean can be seen over the mountain battlements of the west. On this magnificent deathbed the Statesman of Israel breathed his last. Lest the gratitude which so often follows the dead, though denied to the living, should pay him Divine honors, they buried him in darkness and silence; and no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day."

"A greater gain to the world...than all the growth of scientific knowledge is the growth of the scientific spirit, with its courage and serenity, its disciplined conscience, its intellectual morality, its habitual response to any disclosure of the truth."

"God knows, I am very unequal to the task, destitute of all spiritual talents, void of all acquired knowledge, and unprovided with any Brother Laborers to carry on the work I wish to begin. But, as with the grace of God all things are possible."

"A man's worth is within him. It is in his mind and heart. It is in his sympathies, his loves, his motives, his aims and ambitions. It is in the truth of his words, in the nobility of his thoughts, in the rectitude of his conduct. It lies in his courageous obedience to conscience, doing always that which he knows to be right."

"We have abundant cause for thankfulness to God on account of the many blessings which he has conferred on us ; but we will show ourselves unworthy of these blessings if we do not do all that is in our power to promote every good work by which they may be increased and confirmed to those who shall come after us."

"The fact remains that the Catholic home is the great nursery of faith. Religion is engaged in the work of character forming and childhood is the period of character formation. The stronghold of childhood must then be the citadel of the Church's hope."

"Scores of Catholics lived in this territory over thirty years and reared families without sacraments, Mass or priest. The losses to the Faith in Wyoming, as in neighbouring states, have been appalling. Vicars Apostolic, afterwards bishops, had no funds for educating or supporting missionary priests. It would seem that in 1887, as indeed for nearly a decade after, Wyoming's need was not so much diocesan organization as travelling missionaries."

"There was everything in his character of a good, laborious, and devoted bishop. And look upon him in his ordinary life, in the ordinary intercourse with the world! He was gentleness, his heart was full of love. It warmed with love unto every one. But there was nothing in him of the guile of earth. His heart was pure; he felt the duty of the application of Christian charity to all mankind."

"I never thought I was ever to be taken away from Brooklyn except by death; otherwise I might have gone slower."

"I have indeed striven to live among you, rather as an elder brother, not perhaps in years, but in thought and feeling, and far more pleasant to me is this fraternal relation than the assumption of a dignity rather inspiring awe than love, and repulsing and repelling instead of attracting. I thank God that we live under different conditions from those that prevail in many other countries. Abroad there often exist conditions that raise barriers between the bishop and his clergy, and between the priest and his people. I thank God that it is different here, and that the relationship is nearer that of father and brother. Yet I am satisfied that the body of the priesthood of the old world show no greater reverence for their bishops or their flocks to the priests than is shown in the new world."

"Even under our liberal form of government the State cannot afford to allow unbridled religious liberty. The utmost that is consistent with the very existence of the civil government is a limited religious liberty. Nor can we agree with those who seem to hold that a multiplicity of warring religious beliefs is the ideal of social perfection. The conditions that necessitate even a limited toleration of all beliefs will ever prove more or less dangerous to the welfare of the people according as religious convictions are more or less strong, or according as they are maintained by men more or less ignorant and narrow. When it is needlessly proclaimed it is an invitation to sectarianism, with its inevitable disunions and discussions; it is perilous to the peace of a community. The closer the union between the civil and religious authority, as long as each aids the other, and neither encroaches upon the domain of the other, the better will it be for both and the more secure will be the peace of the people."

"After the insurrection of 1898, and the Spanish-American War that followed, the people suffered greatly, not only from the evils of war, but also from the loss of their cattle and horses by epidemics. Many of their churches were destroyed, not only by the insurrectos, but also by United States troops. The chief evil, however, was the lack of priests."

"We fear not science. We deplore ignorance. If the men of science will be true to their reason, we will meet them on every field and teach them the harmonies of nature and of faith. We will show them how the human mind turns from the creature in all its variety and beauty to the creature's God."

"The way has been prepared: the Navajos are well-disposed toward the Catholic missionaries and give founded hopes for an abundant harvest of souls."

"The glorious achievements of the Society are blended with the archives of universal history, identified with the civilization, learning, conversion, and prosperity of innumerable countries. She has had her alternations of adversity and triumph, she has passed through the deep shades of night as well as the bright beams of day. She has had friends — devoted and true — in every class and grade of life; she has encountered, too, the fiercest and most formidable enemies, in the same."

"Each century saw its zealots striving for the preservation of ecclesiastical life in the monasteries and the canonicates, eager for the restoration and perfection of the schools, and endeavoring to provide for the moral and spiritual enlightenment of the people. Through the unselfish efforts of these leaders of society, whether the Pope, the emperor, a bishop or a prince, the modern world can see the educational ideal of the age, and obtain a fair view of the actual conditions which existed."

"A people who are to govern themselves need virtue and morality much more than intellectual knowledge to appreciate and preserve the form of self-government. Hence it is so truly said that a Republic needs moral and virtuous citizens."

"As with the individual, so with the nation dost Thou deal most mercifully. With the breath of Thy love Thou hast called it into existence. Thou didst bless it with wise and prudent founders. Thou hast implanted in the breasts of its citizens a sense of right, a love of justice. Thou hast watched over its beginnings. Thou hast brought it, in a brief space of time, to a height of unparalleled prosperity. Thou hast, when its existence was endangered, either by attacks from without or by dissensions within, filled the hearts of its faithful children with love and devotion, and Thou hast raised from among them valiant men to defend its interests. Thou hast led them to victory, and when Thou didst make them victorious, Thou didst, too, inspire them with mercy and compassion for the vanquished. For all this, Oh Heavenly Father, we return loving thanks."

"Under his careful and prudent administration the diocese has prospered and acquired order and solidity."

"His personality won friends for the Church on all sides, whilst his vigorous defence of Catholic doctrine, as well as his clean-cut, outspoken advocacy of American rights and duties, gave to the Church in southern California a great onward movement."

"My work has been a pleasant one, and I have striven to keep but one thing in view, and that is to do as much good as possible."

"To understand a great movement in the world of thought or action, it is usually necessary to approach it on its historic side. It is difficult to grasp its inner spirit and purpose, or gauge aright its possibilities and power, except one. bring to the study of its present condition a thorough knowledge of its past. The larger and more complex the movement is, the more important the study of its past becomes. Only in its history are we able to discern, in clear perspective, the principles that gave it birth, presided over its development, and form the mainspring of its present activity."

"One can live there and feel quite at home because one can lose his heart to any country, and it is a commonplace that "home is where the heart is.""

"Arise, O Soul, and gird thee up anew, Though the black camel Death kneel at thy gate; No beggar thou that thou for alms shouldst sue; Be the proud captain still of thine own fate!"

"• Let the future historian, if he will, add beauty of expression and the charm of polished diction to this plain, unpretentious narrative. The beauty of truth satisfied the author's wish; he strove for nothing more."

"He was a horse of goodly countenance, rather expressive of vigilance than fire; though an unnatural appearance of fierceness was thrown into it by the loss of his ears, which had been cropped pretty close to his head."

"In the younger days of the Republic there lived in the county of —— two men, who were admitted on all hands to be the very best men in the county; which, in the Georgia vocabulary, means they could flog any other two men in the county."

"It is said that a hundred gamecocks will live in perfect harmony together it you do not put a hen with them; and so it would have been with Billy and Bob, had there been no women in the world. But there were women in the world, and from them each of our heroes had taken to himself a wife. The good ladies were no strangers to the prowess of their husbands. and, strange as it may seem, they presumed a little upon it."

"All the knowing ones were consulted as to the issue, and they all agreed, to a man, in one of two opinions: either that Bob would flog Billy, or Billy would flog Bob."

"Language cannot describe the scene that followed; the shouts, oaths, frantic gestures, taunts, replies, and little fights; and therefore I shall not attempt it."

"When young persons are summoned from this world ere they have mingled in its sinful pursuits, they can be readily yielded into the hands of God, whose merciful providence is then rather a cause for joy and thanksgiving than an occasion of sorrowing and regret; because there is a well-founded hope of their having attained the great end of their existence — the enjoyment of eternal happiness."