JUNE 29. Theology is not a closed and completed science, but a work for long generations of workmen. It is never other than tentative. No one knows better than the writer that his work ("Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit") is only a preliminary essay. If he binds up his sheaf, it is only that he may show the fertility of the field, and attract new laborers to it abler than himself. Never does he shut his eyes to the fact that his sheaf, so painfully and perhaps prematurely bound, must be unbound again, to receive ears grown at an earlier day which he ought not to have overlooked, and ears of a new harvest not yet come to maturity. Auguste Sabatier, died Ap. 12, 1901. JUNE 30. Education is the passage from faith in authority to personal conviction of truths clearly recognized. The individual who exploits or destroys the social bond is like a child who to warm himself sets fire to the house of his fathers. The society which sacrifices the rights, the education, and the advancement of the individual to its own selfish advantage, is like a mother who devours her children. Moral forces are better than legal forces. Virtue is better than laws of prohibition. My property will be better guarded if I live among honest people, than by the police if I live among thieves. A. Sabatier. JULY 1. Abhor luxury with all your soul. Beneath her fair garments lies a loathsome body and the claws of a beast; but under the homely robes of a simple and pure life, beauty breathes in the very body, and the heart throbs with everlasting health. Stopford A. Brooke. JULY 2. Burn me or not burn me, I am fixt: O higher, holier, earlier, purer church, I have found thee, and not leave thee any more. With all his devil's doctrines; and refuse, Reject him, and abhor him. Thomas Cranmer. Born July 2, 1489, burnt at the stake March 21, 1556. JULY 3. Liberty, law, and public power are the elements of social life. Law and liberty without power are anarchy; law and force without liberty make a despotism; force alone is barbarism; liberty and law, joined with force, make the Republic, the only good civil constitution. Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804. America! half-brother of the world. Philip James Bailey. JULY 4. 'Tis freedom fires us all, and strengthens each brave son, From him who guides the plough to godlike Washington. No pent up Utica contracts our powers, But the whole boundless continent is ours. Jonathan M. Sewall, 1749-1808. She that lifts up the manhood of the poor, Blessed in all tongues, and dear to every blood, J. R. Lowell. JULY 5. "History is the light of truth," says Cicero; a noble expression, which reflects honor on the pure and upright mind of its author. On the clearness and steadiness of this light, depends its value in guiding us through the obscure and difficult passages of human life. Tacitus has remarked that it is the office of the historian to take care that virtue be not passed over in silence, but so to represent things, that men may fear to do evil, from dread of the shame which may await them in posterity. A love of history is inseparable from a regard for ourselves. We feel great pleasure in reading histories which present examples of what ennobles and exalts the human character. Nathaniel Hawthorne, born July 4, 1804. JULY 6. Liberty that is partial, that does not assert herself for all, is suicidal. To be immortal, Liberty must be universal. T. M. Post. JULY 7. Great minds, and perhaps great minds only, understand the exquisite truth, that no man stands in another's way in the road to honor, that the world is wide enough for the virtues and talents of all. Joseph Story, 1779-1845. Content thyself to be obscurely good, Joseph Addison. JULY 8. The business of our redemption is to rub over the defaced copy of the creation, reprint God's image upon the soul, and set forth nature in a second and fairer edition. Robert South, died July 8, 1716, aged 83. |