WAYLAND, Herman Lincoln Quotes
(1830-1898), American clergyman
Curiosity is looking over other people's stairs, and overlooking our own.
Universal suffrage, without universal education, would be a curse.
An egotist is a man who talks so much about himself that he gives me no time to talk about myself.
If any one sincerely, candidly, unselfishly tries to understand and to obey the voice of divine wisdom, he will not go fatally astray.
We are all the time following the influences which will presently, be our rulers; we are making our own destiny. We are choosing our habits, our associates, our traits, our homes. In time these acquire a power over us which enslaves our will, and from them we neither will nor can break loose.
Show us the man who never makes a mistake and we will show a man who never makes anything. The capacity for occasional blundering is inseparable from the capacity to bring things to pass. The only men who are past the danger of making mistakes are the men who sleep at Greenwood.
The only people who make no mistakes are dead people. I saw a man last week who has not made a mistake for four thousand years. He was a mummy in the Egyptian department of the British Museum.
Murmur at nothing. If our ills are reparable, it is ungrateful; if remediless, it is vain. A Christian builds his fortune on a better foundation than stoicism; he is pleased with every thing that happens, because he knows it could not happen if it did not please God; and that which pleases God must be best.
As the great test of medical practice is that it heals the patient, so the great test of preaching is that it converts and builds up the hearers.
Four centuries ago, Protestantism had not an existence as an organized power. Today it leads the world. The intelligence, the wealth, the force of arms, the morality, the civilization is with the Protestant nations.
To value riches is not to be covetous. They are the gift of God, and, like every gift of his, good in themselves, and capable of a good use. But to overvalue riches, to give them a place in the heart which God did not design them to fill, this is covetousness.
Break down Sunday, close the churches, open the bars and the theatres on that day, and where would values be?—What was real estate worth in Sodom?
A saint is a man of convictions, who has been dead a hundred years, canonized now, but cannonaded while living.
|
