The universe is a vast system of exchange. Every artery of it is in motion, throbbing with reciprocity, from the planet to the rotting leaf. The vapor climbs the sunbeam, and comes back in blessings upon the exhausted herb. The exhalation of the plant is wafted to the ocean. And so goes on the beautiful commerce of nature. And all because of dissimilarity--because no one thing is sufficient in itself, but calls for the assistance of something else, and repays by a contribution in turn.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
All evil, in fact the very existence of evil, is inexplicable until we refer to the paternity of God. It hangs a huge blot in the universe until the orb of divine love rises behind it. In that apposition we detect its meaning. It appears to us but a finite shadow as it passes across the disc of infinite light.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Nature is God perpetually working; and we need only look around us to see and to feel that truth of a Providence to which our deepest instincts turn.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
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.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Always the idea of unbroken quiet broods around the grave. It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forevermore. There the child nestles peacefully as ever it lay in its mother's arms, and the workman's hands lie still by his side, and the thinker's brain is pillowed in silent mystery, and the poor girl's broken heart is steeped in a balm that extracts its secret woe, and is in the keeping of a charity that covers all blame.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
With infinite depths of truth, and an incessant spring of spiritual life, Christianity cannot be limited to any time, or petrified in any shape. It is fluent and eternal. The reconciling element of the world, it goes forth into every age, and responds to the deepest tone of want in every posture of humanity.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Old age ought to be, and essentially is a manifestation of what is hidden in the depths of man's nature. It might be, it should be, not an exhibition of crackling impotence and gloomy decay, but the very crown and ripening of life--the symbol of maturity, not of dissolution.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Tomorrow may never come to us. We do not live in tomorrow. We cannot find it in any of our title-deeds. The man who owns whole blocks of real estate, and great ships on the sea, does not own a single minute of tomorrow. Tomorrow! It is a mysterious possibility, not yet born. It lies under the seal of midnight--behind the veil of glittering constellations.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
The best men are not those who have waited for chances, but taken them--besieged the chance, conquered the chance, and made the chance their servitor.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
How much in this world is charged to chance or fortune, or veiled under a more devout name, and accorded to Providence; while, when we come to look honestly into affairs, we find it to be a debt of our own accumulation, and one which we must inevitably pay.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
The devil has been painted swarthy, cloven-footed, horned, and hideous. Do we expect to see him in that shape? O, surely it would be better for us, if he did come in that shape! The trouble is the devil never does come in that shape. He comes by chance, with unregistered signals, and in all sorts of counterfeit presentiments.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Who shall say that prayer has no grounds of reason because science cannot find any avenue for it? Who shall forbid this instinct that cleaves every cloud strait up to God, because visibly he does not reach down his hand?
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
What a blessing man acknowledges in sleep, whose soft oblivion makes an island of every day, and breaks the hold of continuous care; that cools the hot brain, and bathes the weary eye-lids, and lets the buffeted and foundering heart cast anchor every night in some harbor of happy dreams. He feels the beneficence of that law which makes even misery halt, and besieging fortune strike its tents, and in the great democracy of nature levels the children of men in common helplessness and common need; finding no conditions so wretched, no spot so bleak that even the most desperate cannot recline nearer to the bosom of the common mother, and forget for a little while their sorrow and their shame.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Christ's revelation of the All-encompassing Providence over-arches us at times like the clear night-sky, when one halts on his march through the desert, breathing a blessed coolness over our parched and weary nature, and amidst the lonely waste, the drifting sand, and the fluttering tents, looking down upon us with a great and tender assurance of permanence and peace.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Revolution does not insure progress. You may overturn thrones, but what proof that anything better will grow upon the soil?
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
We do not compromise our own faith by admitting the honesty of another's doubt.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Neutral men are the devil's allies.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Truth is new, as well as old. It has new forms; and where you may find a new statement, an earnest statement, you may conclude that by the law of progress it is more likely to be a correct statement than that which has been repeated for ages by the lips of tradition.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Morality is but the vestibule of religion.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Genius is the accumulated wealth of our humanity--its most intense development concentrated at one point, and then with clearer expression and with mysterious power shot back to us across the galvanic lines of thought and feeling.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Character has more effect than anything else. Let a number of loud-talking men take up a particular question, and one man of character, of known integrity and beauty of soul, will outweigh them all in his influence.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
God's work is freedom. Freedom is dear to his heart. He wishes to make man's will free, and at the same time wishes it to be pure, majestic, and holy.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
In calm, fine nights of the latter summer, when the woods are clothed with the luxuriance of maturity, and the corn stands fully ripe--in the clear midnight, when all else is still--there comes a manifestation as of the conscious earth communing with the conscious universe. There rises a low, deep murmur of the sea upon its shores, and the leaves shiver with a sudden ecstasy, and a light of answering gladness ripples along the firmament, and sparkles to the edge of the remotest constellations. It is as if nature herself knew the counsel that embosoms all things, and for a moment confessed the glorious purpose.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Powers are developed here until they are capable of higher development in other portions of God's limitless universe; and suffering and temptation discipline the soul for a sphere where temptation shall no more be needed, and where the spirit shall go forward to practice upon what it has learned.
EDWIN HUBBELL CHAPIN, Living Words
The excellence and inspiration of truth is in the pursuit, not in the mere having of it. The pursuit of all truth is a kind of gymnastics; a man swings from one truth with higher strength to gain another. The continual glory is the possibility opening before us.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
The temptation is not here, where you are reading about it or praying about it: it is down in your shop, among bales and boxes, ten-penny nails, and sandpaper.
EDWIN HUBBELL CHAPIN, Living Words
Liberty is an old fact; it has had its heroes and its martyrs in almost every age. As I look back through the vista of centuries, I can see no end of the ranks of those who have toiled and suffered in its cause, and who wear upon their breasts its stars of the legion of honor.
EDWIN HUBBELL CHAPIN, Living Words
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