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| William Ellery Channing
All noble enthusiasms pass through a feverish stage, and grow wiser and more serene. Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict. Do anything rather than give yourself to reverie. Each of us is meant to have a character all our own, to be what no other can exactly be, and do what no other can exactly do. Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach. Every human being is intended to have a character of his own; to be what no others are, and to do what no other can do. Every man is a volume if you know how to read him. Faith is love taking the form of aspiration. Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Great efforts from great motives is the best definition of a happy life. Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves. He who is false to the present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and you will see the effect when the weaving of a lifetime is unraveled. Ideas are the mightiest influence on earth. One great thought breathed into a man may regenerate him. Immortality is the glorious discovery of Christianity. Iron hand in a velvet glove. It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind's dignity. Labor is discovered to be the grand conqueror, enriching and building up nations more surely than the proudest battles. Men are never very wise and select in the exercise of a new power. Mistake, error, is the discipline through which we advance. Natural amiableness is too often seen in company with sloth, with uselessness, with the vanity of fashionable life. One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. The mind, in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven. The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves. The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts. War will never yield but to the principles of universal justice and love, and these have no sure root but in the religion of Jesus Christ. We are judged not by the degree of our light but by fidelity to the light we have. We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit; but the same blunder is made by every person who is over eager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure. |
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