hopelessness of the task is visible on all their thousand faces, athwart which, while they talk or listen or look, the shadow of care flits as if thrown from dark wings wheeling in circuits above them. The sorrow and toil and worry they have thought to put away, still lie close to them, like a burden which, having been set down, waits to be taken up again. God surely sees with love and pity His all-enduring and all-hoping children; it is His voice we hear in the words of Christ, "Misereor super turbam." I cannot but wish to be myself, and therefore to be happy; but when I think of God as essential to my happiness, I feel it is enough for me to know and love Him; for to imagine I might be of service to Him would be the fondest conceit. But He makes it possible for me to help my fellows, and in doing this, I fulfil the will of Him who is the father of all. The divine reveals itself in the human; and that religion alone is true which, striking its roots deep into humanity, exerts all its power to make men more godlike by making them more human.

They who in good faith inflicted the tortures of the Inquisition were led not by the light of reason, or that which springs from the contemplation of the life of Christ, but by the notion that the rack and fagot are instruments of mercy, if employed to save men from eternal torments; and tyrants, who are always cruel, gave encouragement and aid to the victims of fanaticism. Why should the sorrow or the sin or the loss of any human being give me pleasure? Is it not always the same story? In the fall of one we all are degraded, since, whoever fails, it is our common nature which suffers hurt.

Whether or not we have come forth from a merely animal condition, let us thank God we are human, and bend all our energies to remove the race farther and farther from the life over which thought and love and conscience have no dominion.

In the presence of the mighty machine, whose wheels and arms are everywhere, whose power is drawn from the exhaustless oceans and the boundless heavens, the importance of the individual dwindles and seems threatened with extinction. At such a time it is good to know that a right human soul is greater than a universe of machinery.

We feel that we are higher than all the suns and planets, because we know and love, and they do not; but when, in the light of this superiority, we turn to the thought of our own littleness, being scarcely more than nothing, such trouble rises in the soul that we throw ourselves upon God to escape doubt of the reality of life. If we believe that man is what he eats, his education is simply a question of alimentation; but if we hold that he is what he knows, and loves, and yearns, and strives for, his education is a problem of soul-nutrition.

The child is made educable by its faith in the father and mother, which is nothing else than faith in their truth and love; and the educableness of the man is in proportion to his faith in the sovereign and infinite nature of truth and love, which is faith in God.

It is in youth that we are most susceptible of education, because it is the privilege of youth to be free from tyrannic cares, and to be sensitive to the charm of noble and disinterested passions. If we show the young soul the way to higher worlds, he will not ask us to strew it with flowers, or pave it with gold, but he will be content to walk with bruised feet along mountain wastes, if at the summit is illumination and joy and peace.

As in religion many are called but few chosen, as in the race for wealth and place many start but few win the prize, so in the pursuit of intellectual and moral excellence, of the few who begin, the most soon weary, while of the remnant, many grow infirm in purpose or in body before the goal is reached.

Time and space, which hold all things, separate all things; but religion and culture bind them into unity through faith in God and through knowledge, thus forming a communion of holy souls and noble minds, for whom discord and division disappear in the harmony of the divine order in which temporal and spatial conditions of separateness yield to the eternal presence of truth and love. New ideas seem at first to remain upon the surface of the soul, and generations sometimes pass before they enter into its substance and become motives of conduct; and, in the same way, sentiments may influence conduct, when the notions from which they sprang have long been rejected. The old truth must renew itself as the race renews itself; it must be re-interpreted and re-applied to the life of each individual and of each generation, if its liberating and regenerating power is to have free scope. Reason and conscience are God's most precious gifts; and what does He ask but that we make use of them?

Right thinking, like right doing, is the result of innumerable efforts, innumerable failures, the final outcome of which is a habit of right thought and conduct.

Whoever believes in truth, freedom, and love, and follows after them with his whole heart, walks in God's highway, which leads to peace and blessedness.

A thing may be obscure from defect of light or defect of sight; and in the same way an author may be found dull either because he is so, or because his readers are dull. The noblest book even is but dead matter until a mind akin to its creator's awakens it to life again.

The appeal to the imagination has infinitely more charm than the appeal to the senses.

"But when evening falls," says Machiavelli, "I go home and enter my study. On the threshold I lay aside my country garments, soiled with mire, and array myself in courtly garb. Thus attired, I make my entrance into the ancient courts of the men of old, where they receive me with love, and where I feed upon that food which only is my own, and for which I was born. For four hours' space I feel no annoyance, forget all care; poverty cannot frighten nor death appall me." A man of genius works for all, for he compels all to think. An enlightened mind and a generous heart make the world good and fair.

Where there is perfect confidence, conversation does not drag; while for those who love it is enough that they be together: if they are silent, it is well; if they speak, mere nothings suffice.

The world of knowledge, all that men know, is, in truth, little and simple enough. It seems vast and intricate because we are imperfectly educated.

The soul, like the body, has its atmosphere, out of which it cannot live.

When opinions take the place of convictions, ideas that of beliefs, great characters become rare.

The pith of virtue lies not in thinking, but in doing. A real man strives to assert himself; for whether he seeks wealth, or power, or fame, or truth, or virtue, or the good of his fellows, he knows that he can succeed only through self-assertion, through the prevalence of his own thought and life.

They who abdicate the rights God gives the individual, seek in vain to preserve by constitutional enactments a semblance of liberty.

If it is human to hate whom we have injured, it is not less so to despise whom we have deceived; and yet those who are easily deceived are the most innocent or the most high-minded and generous. It seems hardly a human and must therefore be a divine thing, to live and deal with men without in any way giving them trouble and annoyance. Truth loves not contention, and when men fight for it, it vanishes in the noise and smoke of the combat.

The controversies of the schools, whether of philosophy, theology, literature, or natural science, have been among the saddest exhibitions of ineptitude. Is it conceivable that a thinker, or a believer, or a scholar, or an investigator should wrangle in the spirit of a pothouse politician? The more certain we are of ourselves and of the truth of what we hold, the easier it is for us to be patient and tolerant.

Wicked is whoever finds pleasure in another's pain. We can know more than we can love. Hence communion with the world is wider through the mind than through the heart, though less