The history of Christ is as surely poetry as it is history, and in
general, only that history is history which might also be
fable.--_Novalis._
~Christianity.~--Christianity is within a man, even as he is gifted with
reason; it is associated with your mother's chair, and with the first
remembered tones of her blessed voice.--_Coleridge._
There was never law, or sect, or opinion, did so much magnify goodness
as the Christian religion doth.--_Bacon._
No religion ever appeared in the world whose natural tendency was so
much directed to promote the peace and happiness of mankind. It makes
right reason a law in every possible definition of the word. And
therefore, even supposing it to have been purely a human invention, it
had been the most amiable and the most useful invention that was ever
imposed on mankind for their good.--_Lord Bolingbroke._
Far beyond all other political powers of Christianity is the demiurgic
power of this religion over the kingdoms of human opinion.--_De
Quincey._
Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts,--the
cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its claims.--_De
Tocqueville._
Nature never gives to a living thing capacities not particularly meant
for its benefit and use. If nature gives to us capacities to believe
that we have a Creator whom we never saw, of whom we have no direct
proof, who is kind and good and tender beyond all that we know of
kindness and goodness and tenderness on earth, it is because the
endowment of capacities to conceive a Being must be for our benefit and
use; it would not be for our benefit and use if it were a
lie.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
A man can no more be a Christian without facing evil and conquering it
than he can be a soldier without going to battle, facing the cannon's
mouth, and encountering the enemy in the field.--_Chapin._
There was never found in any age of the world, either philosophy, or
sect or religion, or law or discipline, which did so highly exalt the
good of communion, and depress good private and particular, as the holy
Christian faith: hence it clearly appears that it was one and the same
God that gave the Christian law to men who gave those laws of nature to
the creatures.--_Bacon._
Christianity is intensely practical. She has no trait more striking than
her common sense.--_Charles Buxton._
Christianity ruined emperors, but saved peoples. It opened the palaces
of Constantinople to the barbarians, but it opened the doors of cottages
to the consoling angels of the Saviour.--_Alfred de Musset._
Always put the best interpretation on a tenet. Why not on Christianity,
wholesome, sweet, and poetic? It is the record of a pure and holy soul,
humble, absolutely disinterested, a truth-speaker, and bent on serving,
teaching, and uplifting men. Christianity taught the capacity, the
element, to love the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal
happiness. It taught that to love him was happiness,--to love him in
others' virtues.--_Emerson._
Christian faith is a grand cathedral with divinely pictured windows.
Standing without, you see no glory nor can possibly imagine any;
standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable
splendors.--_Hawthorne._
Christians are like the several flowers in a garden, that have each of
them the dew of heaven, which, being shaken with the wind, they let fall
at each other's roots, whereby they are jointly nourished, and become
nourishers of each other.--_Bunyan._
~Church.~--The Church is a union of men arising from the fellowship of
religious life; a union essentially independent of, and differing from,
all other forms of human association.--_Rev. Dr. Neander._