Great Throughts Treasury

"Truth is congenial to man. Moral truth is then most consummate when, like beauty, it commends itself without argument. The righteous not only does right, but loves to do right."

"The active part of man consists of powerful instincts, some of which are gentle and continuous; others violent and short; some baser, some nobler, and all necessary. "

"Virtue is its own reward, and brings with it the truest and highest pleasure; but if we cultivate it only for pleasure's sake, we are selfish, not religious, and will never gain the pleasure, because we can never have the virtue."

"Devotion to an ideal is worship; the higher the ideal, the nobler the worship. "

"The word God is a theology in itself, indivisibly one, inexhaustibly various, from the vastness and simplicity of its meaning. Admit a God, and you introduce among the subjects of your knowledge a fact encompassing, closing in upon, absorbing ever other fact conceivable. "

"Whatever each man worships inwardly is his God, whether he knows it or not. He who has a ruling passion worships one God, good or evil. He who is carried at random by impulses has many gods; perhaps as shiftless, as shapeless, as unworthy, as any heathen divinities."

"As to the war, while it is always thought rash to have any strong military convictions, I have always believed that if they would go straight to Sebastopol early in the season they would take it with little difficulty."

"God has two families of children on this earth, the once-born and the twice-born."

"I first began to read religious books at school, and especially the Bible, when I was eleven years old; and almost immediately commenced a habit of secret prayer."