This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Now this is the ground and original of the Spirit of Love in the creature, it is and must be a will to all goodness; and you have not the Spirit of Love in you till you have this will to all goodness at all times and on all occasions. You may indeed do many works of love and delight in them -- especially at such times as they are not inconvenient to your state or temper or occurrences in life. But the Spirit of Love is not in you till it is the spirit of your life, till you live freely, willingly, and universally according to it.
Let a clergyman but intend to please God in all his actions, as the happiest and best thing in the world, and then he will know that there is nothing noble in a clergyman but a burning zeal for the salvation of souls; nor anything poorer in his profession [than] idleness and a worldly spirit.
Goodness is the only value that seems in this world of appearances to have any claim to be an end in itself. Virtue is its own reward.
If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it.
Action | Experience | Poetry | Thought | Thought |
Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects in the phenomenal world.
With the civilized man contentment is a myth. From the cradle to the grave he is forever longing and striving after something better, an indefinable something, some new object yet unattained.
Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.
The advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity, during the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness within the church over the morbidness with which the old hell-fire theology was more harmoniously related. We have now whole congregations whose preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it. They ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man. They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned Christian with the salvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible rather than admirable; and a sanguine and 'muscular' attitude, which to our forefathers would have seemed purely heathen, has become in their eyes an ideal element of Christian character. I am not asking whether or not they are right, I am only pointing out the change.
The new ardor which burns in his breast consumes in its glow the lower noes which formerly beset him, and keeps him immune against infection from the entire groveling portion of his nature. Magnanimities once impossible are now easy; paltry conventionalities and mean incentives once tyrannical hold no sway. The stone wall inside of him has fallen, the hardness in his heart has broken down. The rest of us can, I think, imagine this by recalling our state of feeling in those temporary melting moods into which either the trials of real life, or the theatre, or a novel sometimes throws us. Especially if we weep! For it is then as if our tears broke through an inveterate inner dam, and let all sorts of ancient peccancies and moral stagnancies drain away, leaving us now washed and soft of heart and open to every nobler leading. With most of us the customary hardness quickly returns, but not so with saintly persons. Many saints, even as energetic ones as Teresa and Loyola, have possessed what the church traditionally reveres as a special grace, the so-called gift of tears. In these persons the melting mood seems to have held almost uninterrupted control. And as it is with tears and melting moods, so it is with other exalted affections. Their reign may come by gradual growth or by a crisis; but in either case it may have come to stay.
Action | Faith | Man | Nature | Necessity | Present | Truth | Will |
God grant indeed thy words are not for nought! Then shalt thou save me, since for many a day to such a dreadful life I have been brought: nor will I spare with all my heart to pay what man soever takes my grief away; ah! I will love thee, if thou lovest me but well enough my saviour now to be.
Care | Day | Fear | Hate | Hope | Labor | Life | Life | Little | Maxims | Men | Nothing | Pain | People | Rest | Time | Will |
Rejoice, lest pleasureless ye die. Within a little time must ye go by. Stretch forth your open hands, and while ye live take all the gifts that Death and Life may give!
Action |
If our houses, or clothes, our household furniture and utensils are not works of art, they are either wretched makeshifts, or, what is worse, degrading shams of better things.
Vision |
Wits, like drunken men with swords, are apt to draw their steel upon their best acquaintances.
Humility is often a false front we employ to gain power over others.
Action |
Few men are so clever as to know all the mischief they do.
Chance |