Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
The soul which fathoms every league of the celestial arc--knows, as a mariner the sea, the distant latitudes where comets flame, and worlds career, and constellations shake their awful clusters--wanders amid the spectral nebula, and makes suns and systems to be but glittering beads upon the aspiring thread of its induction, cannot perish. There is a future life. In a universe so spherical and whole as this, reason argues that its own incompleteness and capacity for more are suggestive--are prophetical. Under-shadows and cross-lights of mystery, these filmy depths of present being, shudder in sympathy with something beyond.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Every duty is great; great, because it tries our principle; great, because for the time being it tries our loyalty to conscience, and our energy and will.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Death is not an end, but a transition-crisis. All the forms of decay are but masks of regeneration--the secret alembics of vitality.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Let science extend the domain of actual knowledge, and lay bare as it may the secrets of the material world. It only exposes more and more the proportions of the great cathedral, and shows us the lamps of God's glory, and the infinite recesses of his love. It only wafts us on through the ever-rolling harmonies of the universe, until we pause before that awful veil of mystery in which he hides the essence of his being and the counsels of his thought.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Genius holds its universal dominion because it touches the deepest suggestions and utters the multiform experiences of a common nature.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Music, sculpture, poetry, painting--these are glorious works; but the soul that creates them is more glorious than they. The music shall die on the passing wind, the poem may be lost in the confusion of tongues, the marble will crumble and the canvas will fade, while the soul shall be quenchless and strong, filled with a nobler melody, kindling with loftier themes, projecting images of unearthly beauty, and drinking from springs of imperishable life.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Religion is the most substantial thing in the world; it can take more hard knocks than anything else. Geology has jammed great boulders against it, and it is not even scratched; astronomy has assailed it, yet amid the bright spheres of heaven it lifts its glorious head. It has stood all the wear and tear of all sciences and all discussion; it is the most substantial thing you can think of; it is the most robust thing in existence. Do not think you can hurt it by taking it into your workshop. Let it out of your clothes pocket; it will suffer there. The only thing that religion dreads is lack of room, lack of freedom, lack of breath. Take it out of your pocket and bring it into everything. Do not fear that it will desecrate religion to bring it into contact with the world. It will consecrate the world; it will consecrate every deed and every act, and make them glorious.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Think for a moment of the great agents and engines of our civilization, and then think what shadowy ideas they all once were. The wheels of the steamship turned as swiftly as they do now, but as silent and unsubstantial as the motions of the inventor's thought; and in the noiseless loom of his meditation were woven the sinews of the printing-press, whose thunder shakes the world.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
He who trusts in the word of God knows that he will find nothing in the material universe but the will of God.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
A life is black, whiten it as you will.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
The great cheat and delusion set before every generation is simply this tradition, that there is anything like real substantial pleasure in sin.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
If one's conscience be dead as a stone, it is as heavy too.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Christianity is revealed to us in the form that walked the streets of Jerusalem and the shores of the Galilean lake; that bent over the sick couch and the bier; mingled in the festival of Cana, and reclined at the Last Supper; and bore a cross up the way of sorrow; and hung and prayed upon the accursed wood, and came forth radiant from the sleep of death and the broken chambers of the sepulchre.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
In sorrow and in suffering are hidden the springs of a peace and a power that can be affected by no outward storms. It is a great thing, when one has grown strong through that trial which melts away the dross and proves the true gold; when, being driven to the handling of many expedients, he has been trained to detect all counterfeit comforts, and to discriminate between unsubstantial good and that which abides every test; when he has learned to dispense with all outward props, can let riches, honors, health drop away from him, and yet feel that all this does not touch his real life; while above these coils of uncertainty and mutation he lifts his naked personality erect in its own spiritual resources. Surely, prosperity has never generated such depths of power, such intrinsic and full consolation.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
There is but a slight difference between the man who may be said to know nothing and him who thinks he knows everything.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
What mean the discipline and trial of life? What mean the dark shocks of disappointment, the breaking of hopes, the sundering of human ties, the terrible baptism of suffering and of fire, if there is not something beyond? If in every bath of sweat and tears, every drop of sorrow, every falling wave, there is something by which I am led more near to God, by which my soul is made stronger and purified, then I can understand life. But if I am hurled in the chaos of life--battered by sorrow today, and kicked by misfortune tomorrow--stricken by my fondest hopes, deluded and deceived, and all is to end in nothingness, I must confess that you present a problem I cannot solve.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Take away the personal Christ from the gospels, leaving the same precepts and doctrines, and the whole aspect of Christianity would change, as the aspect of the earth changes when the sun goes down. The same eternal mountains lift their heads to heaven; the same rivers flow onward. But their animation is gone; they are cold, and gray, and dark. Thus would Christianity be without that central personage, around which all its glories cluster--from which they stream.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Christianity is a system of life communicated from God to the soul of man, embodied in Jesus Christ, who is himself the essential revelation.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Death is a great revealer of what is in a man, and in its solemn shadow appear the naked lineaments of the soul.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
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.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Break up the institution of the family, deny the inviolability of its relations, and in a little while there would not be any humanity.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
If we would induce others to act virtuously, it will prove more effectual to show them their capacities than to expose their weakness--to attract them by a fairer ideal than to terrify them by pictures of misery and shame.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Whatever may be our condition in life, it is better to lay hold of its advantages than to count its evils.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Man is concentric: you have to take fold after fold off of him before you get to the centre of his personality. You must get below his animal nature, habits, customs, affections, daily life, and sometimes go away down into the heart of the man, before you know what is really in him. But when you get into the last core of these concentric rings of personality you find a sense of the infinite--a consciousness of immortality linked to something higher and better.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Sin is the great element of hell, and where it exists heaven cannot be. Its triumphs are deeper than those of time, and more terrible than death. It has swept over the moral world, more glorious than the physical, and blighted by the beautiful and desecrated the holy. It has scattered abroad and afar the seeds of envy, war, lust, intemperence, murder, and all abomination and iniquity. It has drawn man aside from innocence and rectitude, and he has gone forth from the joy of Eden with a bowed head and a burning heart; and, worse than all, it has spread a veil athwart his moral vision, and alienated him from his Maker.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
The night comes for the purpose of checking our busy employment, and introducing an interval of repose between the links of our action and our aspiration. It draws its dim curtain around the field of toil. It buries the objects of our handiwork in darkness, and involves them with uncertainty. It comes to the relief of the exhausted body and the tired brain. Our powers, harmonizing with the diurnal revolutions of the earth, fail with the failing light, and a merciful Providence casts around us this mantle of shadow, and snatches us from our occupation.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
It is not death to have the body called back to the earth, and dissolved into its kindred elements, and mouldered to dust, and, it may be, turn to daisies, in the grave. But it is death to have the soul paralyzed, its inner life quenched, its faculties dissipated; that is death.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Can you conceive of anything that so represents the glory, and truth, and marvelousness of God's nature as the idea of peace?
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
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.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
How many men you see in this world who have become merely the pack-horses of their own possessions; who go through life the veriest slaves to that which they toil for, wasting their health and strength, and, it may be, their higher powers--even their consciences and souls--in the mere effort to accumulate! How many men of this sort you see stumbling along in life like a camel with his load! In fact you do not see the man himself--only the pack of his possessions on his back. He finds it hard work to squeeze through the needle's eye; and when he dies he is hardly missed; for that by which he was known--that of which he was the slave, and not the master--remains behind.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Down below all the crust of human conceptions, of human ideas, Christ sank an artesian well into a source of happiness so pure and blessed that even yet the world does not believe in it.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Life itself suggests a higher good than life itself can yield.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Humanity is so constituted that the basest criminal represents you and me, as well as the most glorious saint that walks on high. We are reflected in all other men; all other men are embodied in us.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
The greatest successes grow out of great failures. In numerous instances the result is better that comes after a series of abortive experiences than it would have been if it had come at once; for all these successive failures induce a skill which is so much additional power working into the final achievement.... The hand that evokes such perfect music from the instrument has often failed in its touch, and bungled among the keys.... Every disappointed effort fences in and indicates the only possible path of success, and makes it easier to find.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Let every man be free to act from his own conscience; but let him remember that other people have consciences too; and let not his liberty be so expansive that in its indulgence it jars and crashes against the liberty of others.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Mercy. That is the gospel. The whole of it in one word.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Books! The chosen depositories of the thoughts, the opinions, and the aspirations of mighty intellects; like wondrous mirrors that have caught and fixed bright images of souls that have passed away; like magic lyres, whose masters have bequeathed them to the world, and which yet, of themselves, ring with unforgotten music, while the hands that touched their chords have crumbled into dust. Books! they are the embodiments and manifestations of departed minds--the living organs through which those who are dead yet speak to us.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
We only attain the true idea of marriage when we consider it as a spiritual union--a union of immortal affections, of undying faculties, of an imperishable destiny.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Home is the seminary of all other institutions. There are the roots of all public prosperity, the foundations of the State, the germs of the church. There is all that in the child makes the future man; all that in the man makes the good citizen.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
No great truth bursts upon man without having its hemisphere of darkness and sorrow.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Our life is what we make it. An insignificant game or a noble trial; a dream or a reality; a play of the senses worn out in selfish use, and flying "swifter than a weaver's shuttle," or an assension of the soul, by daily duties and unfaltering faith, to more spiritual relations and to loftier toils.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
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!
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
God is the explanation of all things.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Nature satisfies my thirst; it feeds my hunger; it finds me clothing; it affords me shelter; it wraps me around when I sleep with beneficent and watchful care; and it takes me at last to its great bosom, where my ashes mingle with their kindred dust.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
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