Life-Schools of Love
Certainly love is the
force by which, and home the place in which, God chiefly fashions souls to
their fine issues. Is our mere body fearfully and wonderfully made? A greater marvel
is the human mind and heart and conscience. To make these, homes spring up the
wide world over. In them strength fits itself to weakness, experience fits
itself to ignorance, protection fits itself to need. They are life-schools in
which the powers of an individual are successively awaked and trained as, year
by year, he passes on through the differing relations of child, youth, parent,
elder, in the circle.
—
William
Channing Gannett (1840-1923)
Our Distant Posterity
Astronomers tell us that
some of the stars are so far above us that a ray of light takes thousands of
years in traversing the intervening distance, and that therefore, if one of
them should be suddenly blotted out of existence, the light which it has been
emitting for many generations past would keep on coming to this world for many
future generations, and no one on the earth would be aware of its destruction
till the last ray which it emitted just before its destruction should have had
time to arrive — that is to say, till as many thousand years from now as a ray
of light requires for traversing the distance. In the meantime it would
continue to illumine the night, not only for us, but for our distant posterity.
So when a good man dies,
For years beyond our ken,
The light he leaves behind him lies
Upon the paths of men.
—
Edwin
C. Sweetser (born March 16, 1847)
Hatred and Love
It
is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not
the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high
degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent
for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the
passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the
withdrawal of his object. Philosophically considered, therefore, the two
passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a
celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid glow. In the spiritual
world, the old physician and the minister—mutual victims as they have been—may,
unawares, have found their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transmuted
into golden love.
—
Nathaniel
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (published March 16, 1850)
From Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments
We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, “that Religion or
the duty which we owe to our Creator and the Manner of discharging it, can be
directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” The Religion then of every man must be left
to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man
to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an
unalienable right. It is unalienable; because the opinions of men, depending
only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds, cannot follow the
dictates of other men: It is unalienable also; because what is here a right
towards men, is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to
render to the Creator such homage, and such only, as he believes to be
acceptable to him. This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of
obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as
a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor
of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, who enters into any
subordinate Association, must always do it with a reservation of his duty to
the general authority; much more must every man who becomes a member of any
particular Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the
Universal Sovereign. We maintain
therefore that in matters of Religion, no man’s right is abridged by the
institution of Civil Society, and that Religion is wholly exempt from its
cognizance. True it is, that no other rule exists, by which any question
which may divide a Society, can be ultimately determined, but the will of the
majority; but it is also true, that the majority may trespass on the rights of
the minority.
—
James
Madison (born March 16, 1751)
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