March 26 1898 Thoughts From Great Minds - Cumberland and Westmorland Newspaper Transcriptions

March 26 1898 Thoughts From Great Minds

THOUGHTS FROM GREAT MINDS.

If life be heavy on your hands,
    Are there no beggars at your gate,
Nor any poor about your lands ?
    Oh, teach the orphan boy to read,
Or teach the orphan girl to sew,
    Pray heaven for a human heart,
And let your selfish sorrows go.

It is not benevolence but justice that can deal with giant evils. It was
not benevolence that gave the people bread twenty years ago, but justice
embodied in the abolition of a cruel and guilty law. But justice is
impossible from a class. It is most certain and easy from a nation; and I
believe we can only reach the depths of ignorance and misery and crime in
this country by an appeal to the justice, the intelligence, and the virtues
of the entire people.
                                                ....John Bright.

Some men give so that you are angry every time that you ask them to
contribute; they give so that their gold and silver shoot you like a
bullet. Other persons give with such beauty that you may remember it as
long as you live; and you say, "It is a pleasure to go to such men."
    There are some men that give as springs do; whether you go to them or
not, they are always full; and your part is merely to put your dish under
the ever-flowing stream.
    Others give just as a pump does when the well is dry, and the pump
leaks.
                                               ....H. W. Beecher

If thou be one whose heart the holy forms
Of young imagination have kept pure,
Stranger ! henceforth be warned; and know that pride,
Howe'er disguised in its own majesty,
Is littleness;   that he who feels contempt
For any living thing, hath faculties
Which he has never used; that thought with him
Is in its infancy. The man whose eye
Is ever on himself, doth look on one,
The least of Nature's works, one who might move
The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds
Unlawful, ever.        O be wiser thou !
Instructed that true knowledge leads to love,
True dignity abides with him alone
Who, in the silent hour of inward thought,
Can still suspect, and still revere himself,
In lowliness of heart.

                                              .....Wordsworth

Who thinks only of himself when his fortune prospers
In misfortune has no friends.

    ...Florian.

Temptation is the fire that brings up the scum
    of the heart.

    ....Boston.

He alone is an acute observer who can observe
    minutely without being observed.                            ....Lavater.

In character, in manners, in style, in all things, the
    supreme excellence is simplicity.

     ....Longfellow

He who is most slow in making a promise is the
    most faithful in the performance of it.
....Rousseau

Bear not false witness, slander not, nor lie.
    Truth is the speech of inward purity.                    ....Sir E.
Arnold

Prosperity is the touchstone of virtue;
    for it is less difficult to bear misfortunes
        than to remain uncorrupted by pleasure.           ....Tacitus

Every man has in himself a continent of
    undiscovered character.   Happy is he who
        acts the Columbus to his own soul.                    ....Sir James
Stevens

Though one but say, "Thy will be done,"
    He hath not lost his day
        At set of sun.

    ....Christina Rossetti

Virtue is like precious odours, most fragrant
    when they are incensed or crushed;
for prosperity doth best discover vice, but
    advertsity doth best discover virtue.                        ....Lord
Bacon

And now what of the future, its duties and its hopes ? At least this, that
the future has larger duties and brighter hopes than the past has ever had.
Of all things the most incredible is that the future should be no better
than the past. If we believe in the mere providence of God, it can hardly
be that human history which has been progressive hitherto should be
retrogressive henceforth, and that all the marvellous march of humanity
should have been led on through labour and through suffering, and through
conquest, end in nothing more than it possesses now, or even in something
less; the mere supposition of such a result can only be met with an
instinctive rejection. Of the modes of this progression, indeed, none can
prophesy, save, indeed, as they do so suggestively from the analogies of the
past, and the guidance of that great aim and ideal which lies in the very
fact of the immortal putting on immortality
                                                        .....Rev. Frederick
Myers.

The break up of old ideas is never an agreeable process, and nowhere has the
work of the pioneer been so hard, so ungrateful, so liable to
misapprehension and misjudgment as in the field of sacred criticism. The
mistakes of the critics have been innumerable, but it is by the mistakes of
the discoverer that the truth is ultimately served.
    There is no process that has so little that is reasonable and conclusive
in it as the process that would discredit exploration by magnifying the
discordances of the explorers. Were this method had recourse to in other
things, as it has been pursued by many of the more officious apologists for
traditional beliefs, we should never have had satisfactory results in any
single science, abstract or concrete, natural or historical, or in any
single line of investigation, whether geographical or antiquarian. . . . . .
. . . . .
    It is necessary therefore, that the earthly vessel which holds the
heavenly treasure should be adapted to the treasure it holds, rather than
the treasure to the vessel. In other words, it will not do for the teacher
in the school or the church to proceed on assumptions which have ceased to
be granted, to follow methods that are no longer recognised, and to maintain
positions that have, in provinces of thought other than religious, been
discredited or abandoned. The new teacher must speak to the new mind in the
terms it has come to understand, and in the methods it has learned to
follow.
                                                    ....Dr. Fairbairn

We are on an ocean where the waves cross and recross, and shift and change
with every changing gale. In fair weather we look down deep into the
glorious blue, and dream of hiding-places of beauty and repose, and palace
caves of eternal joy and calm.
    But we are built to cross the ocean. If the wind lulls and goes to
sleep, and we are rocked by the smooth billows without making any way, we
grow impatient with our craft, and fill her with engines, and boilers and
furnaces, and force her through storm and calm to the haven where we would
be.

There are no rules - no rules - only endless difficulties, endless energy to
meet them, and God within all.

When we have got our newest theories to work, it will be still the same -
difficulty, bewilderment, courage, peace; and nothing ever for long,
because we cannot choose but grow. My perplexity is the perplexity of the
world itself. I am bewildered by the vastness of the life, the energy, that
have to be unified in God. When I try to express it, people say I am vague.
The world is not ready yet. It still craves the old limitations, the old
concentrations, that it may go more comfortably, more comfortably on its
way.
    But it may not be. Life is infinitely more complex to-day than in the
days of Jesus and Paul. Every day it grows more complex. Every hour some
new fact crops up, for which the old religion can find no place. Man's
religion must grow or go. There is no other way.   And it cannot go. . .
. . . . .

God will not let us stop growing however we may struggle and squirm.
                                                    ....John Trevor.