A witty old deacon put it thus:  “Now, brethren, let us get up a supper and eat ourselves rich.  Buy your food, then give it to the church; then go and buy it back again; then eat it up, and your church debt is paid.”

Self-sacrifice is the essential mark of the Christian, and the absence of it is sufficient at once to condemn the man who calls himself by that name and yet has it not, and to declare that he has no right to it.—­Bolton.

There are many comfortable people in the world, but to call any man perfectly happy is an insult.

Women often make light of ruin.  Give them but the beloved objects, and poverty is but a trifling sorrow to bear.—­Thackeray,

Independence is a name for what no man possesses; nothing in the animate or inanimate world is more dependent than man.

Wealth is to be used only as an instrument of action, not as the representative of civil honors and moral excellence.—­Jane Porter.

There is nothing purer, nothing warmer than our first friendship, our first love, our first striving after truth, our first feeling for nature.—­Jean Paul Richter.

Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors as he is out of the crowd.  He is inconceivably wise; the others conceivably.—­Representative Men.

A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner.  Neither do uninterrupted prosperity and success qualify a man for usefulness and happiness.  The storms of adversity, like the storms of the ocean, arouse the faculties and excite the invention, prudence, skill and fortitude of the voyager.

It is not work that hurts men.  It is the corrosion of uncertainty; it is the anticipation of trouble; it is living in a state of painful apprehension.  Therefore we should endeavor to rise out of the atmosphere of gloomy forebodings.  The man who is lifted above fear and its whole brood of mischief can go through twice as much trouble as a man who is subject to its influence.

He that looks out upon life from a sour or severe disposition, with hard and stringent notions, is ill prepared to meet the experiences of the world; but he who has the sweetness of hope, he who has an imagination lit up with cheerfulness, he who has the sense of humor which softens all things—­he who has this atmosphere of the mind—­has made himself superior to accident.  As the angel described by Milton, who was smitten by the sword, and whose wounds healed as soon as the sword was withdrawn, so ought man to be; and when he receives a spear thrust in life, no sooner should the spear be withdrawn than his flesh ought to “close and be itself again.”

A married man falling into misfortune is more apt to retrieve his situation in the world than a single one, chiefly because his spirits are soothed and retrieved by domestic endearments, and his self-respect kept alive by finding that, although all abroad is darkness and humiliation, yet there is a little world of love at home over which he is monarch.