Henry Ward Beecher
Christian philosopher, pulpit orator, patriot and philanthropist. Brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, authoress of the highly recommended Uncle Tom's Cabin. ==================== I, too, will go out and read God in the strata; I, too, through the stars will hear the chiming of the spheres; I will be behind none in enjoying the sweet perfume of flowers; but when I do all this, I will remember that the Bible is the beacon fire at which I have lighted the torch that has guided me to this knowledge and these delights. ==================== The way to become a man is to stop being a child - to grow out of it, to grow beyond it, to grow larger than it. ==================== All things in the natural world symbolize God, yet none of them speak of him but in broken and imperfect words. High above all he sits, sublimer than mountains, grander than storms, sweeter than blossoms and tender fruits, nobler than lords, truer than parents, more loving than lovers. ==================== Christ comes to light up the house from foundation to roof-tree with the glory of God. He knocks at the door and when it is opened to him he enters, and gives to every room order and beauty, and the voice of song, and a wondrous fragrance from his robes, which have borrowed the smell of every flower that grows in the celestial gardens. Who will open the door? ==================== Your moral character is worth more to you than everything else, in all your relationships in life. Not only for religious reasons, but even for the commonest secular reasons, this is so. It is very desirable that you should have information; it is very desirable that you should have a skillful and nimble hand for the pursuit in which you are engaged; it is very desirable that you should understand business and men and life; but it is still more desirable that you should be a man of integrity - of strict, untemptable, or at least unbreakable integrity - even for civil and secular reasons. For nothing is so much in demand as simple untemptability in men; nothing is so much in demand as men who are held, by the fear of God and by the love of rectitude, to that which is right. Their price is above rubies. More than wedges of gold are they worth; and nowhere else are they worth so much as in cities and marts like this, where so much must be put at stake upon the fidelity of agents. ==================== You can learn something everywhere. Everybody
can tell you something. Ask for knowledge, if you desire it.
If you were hungry, I do not believe you would starve. I think
you would ask for food before you would die. I think you would
work for bread before you would perish. And you ought to be ten
times as hungry for knowledge as for food for the body.
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