Edwin Hubbell Chapin Quotes
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Honor to the idealists, whether philosophers or poets. They have improved us by mingling with our daily pursuits great and transcendent conceptions. They have thrown around our sensual life the grandeur of a better, and drawn us up from contacts with the temporal and the selfish to communion with beauty and truth and goodness.
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The true Church is not an institution to be kept apart from the world because the world "is common and unclean," but a vital heart of truth and love, beating with the life of Jesus, and sending abroad its sanctifying pulsations until nothing shall be common and unclean.
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A man that simply loads himself down with possessions of which he has no actual need, when he dies slips out of them--as a little insect might slip out of some parasite shell into which it has ensconced itself--into the grave, and is forgotten.
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Certainly, truth should be strenuous and bold; but the strongest things are not always the noisiest, as any one may see who compares scolding with logic.
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It is exceedingly deleterious to withdraw the sanction of religion from amusement. If we feel that it is all injurious we should strip the earth of its flowers and blot out its pleasant sunshine.
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Not only is music a beautiful and sublime science, the study of which ennobles and purifies the mind of its votary, but how many and excellent are its ministries to others!
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The minister should preach as if he felt that although the congregation own the church, and have bought the pews, they have not bought him. His soul is worth no more than any other man's, but it is all he has, and he cannot be expected to sell it for a salary. The terms are by no means equal. If a parishioner does not like the preaching, he can go elsewhere and get another pew, but the preacher cannot get another soul.
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What a proof of the Divine tenderness is there in the human heart itself, which is the organ and receptacle oft so many sympathies! When we consider how exquisite are those conditions by which it is even made capable of so much suffering--the capabilities of a child's heart, of a mother's heart,--what must be the nature of Him who fashioned its depths, and strung its chords.
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It is difficult to believe that a true gentleman will ever become a gamester, a libertine, or a sot.
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He who today utters a bold truth that seems to shock some old institution with the premonition of destruction, and that scares men from their propriety, will a hundred years hence be regarded as a remarkably conservative man. And yet the people who stand peculiarly upon what they call the foundations of conservatism, and hold to hard, practical facts, now stand upon that which one hundred years ago was rank heresy.
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Is there anything so wretched as to look at a man of fine abilities doing nothing?
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Life itself suggests a higher good than life itself can yield.
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It is a mistake to consider marriage merely as a scheme of happiness. It is also a bond of service. It is the most ancient form of that social ministration which God has ordained for all human beings, and which is symbolized by all the relations of nature.
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God's beneficence streams out from the morning sun, and his love looks down upon us from the starry eyes of midnight. It is his solicitude that wraps us in the air, and the pressure of his hand, so to speak, that keeps our pulses beating. O! it is a great thing to realize that the Divine Power is always working; that nature, in every valve and every artery, is full of the presence of God.
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Some people habitually wear sadness, like a garment, and think it a becoming grace. God loves a cheerful worshipper.
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Some souls are ennobled and elevated by seeming misfortunes, which then become blessings in disguise.
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Into what boundless life, does education admit us. Every truth gained through it expands a moment of time into illimitable being--positively enlarges our existence, and endows us with qualities which time cannot weaken or destroy.
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The church-bells of innumerable sects are all chime-bells to-day, ringing in sweet accordance throughout many lands, and awaking a great joy in the heart of our common humanity.
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We have not the innocence of Eden; but by God's help and Christ's example we may have the victory of Gethsemane.
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Glorify a lie, legalize a lie, arm and equip a lie, consecrate a lie with solemn forms and awful penalties, and after all it is nothing but a lie. It rots a land and corrupts a people like any other lie, and by and by the white light of God's truth shines clear through it, and shows it to be a lie.
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The loss of fortune to a true man is but the trumpet challenge to renewed exertion, not the thunder stroke of destruction.
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Modest expression is a beautiful setting to the diamond of talent and genius.
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We must die alone. To the very verge of the stream our friends may accompany us; they may bend over us, they may cling to us there; but that one long wave from the sea of eternity washes up to the lips, sweeps us from the shore, and we go forth alone! In that untried and utter solitude, then, what can there be for us but the pulsation of that assurance, "I am not alone, because the Father is with me!
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The individual and the race are always moving, and as we drift into new latitudes new lights open in the heaven more immediately over us.