“Sects and Christians that desire to be known by the undue prominence of some single feature of Christianity are necessarily imperfect just in proportion to the distinctness of their peculiarities.  The power of Christian truth is in its unity and symmetry, and not in the saliency or brilliancy of any of its special doctrines.  If among painters of the human face and form there should spring up a sect of the eyes, and another sect of the nose, a sect of the hand, and a sect of the foot, and all of them should agree but in the one thing of forgetting that there was a living spirit behind the features more important than them all, they would too much resemble the schools and cliques of Christians; for the spirit of Christ is the great essential truth; doctrines are but the features of the face, and ordinances but the hands and feet.”

Here are some separate maxims:—­

“It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim-milk.”

“The mother’s heart is the child’s school-room.”

“They are not reformers who simply abhor evil.  Such men become in the end abhorrent themselves.”

“There are many troubles which you can’t cure by the Bible and the Hymn-book, but which you can cure by a good perspiration and a breath of fresh air.”

“The most dangerous infidelity of the day is the infidelity of rich and orthodox churches.”

“The fact that a nation is growing is God’s own charter of change.”

“There is no class in society who can so ill afford to undermine the conscience of the community, or to set it loose from its moorings in the eternal sphere, as merchants who live upon confidence and credit.  Anything which weakens or paralyzes this is taking beams from the foundations of the merchant’s own warehouse.”

“It would almost seem as if there were a certain drollery of art which leads men who think they are doing one thing to do another and very different one.  Thus, men have set up in their painted church-windows the symbolisms of virtues and graces, and the images of saints, and even of Divinity itself.  Yet now, what does the window do but mock the separations and proud isolations of Christian men?  For there sit the audience, each one taking a separate color; and there are blue Christians and red Christians, there are yellow saints and orange saints, there are purple Christians and green Christians; but how few are simple, pure, white Christians, uniting all the cardinal graces, and proud, not of separate colors, but of the whole manhood of Christ!”

“Every mind is entered, like every house, through its own door.”

“Doctrine is nothing but the skin of Truth set up and stuffed.”

“Compromise is the word that men use when the Devil gets a victory over God’s cause.”

“A man in the right, with God on his side, is in the majority, though he be alone; for God is multitudinous above all populations of the earth.”