We know of no scripture which records the pure benignity of the gods on a New England winter night. Their praises have never been ...sung, only their wrath deprecated. The best scripture, after all, records but a meagre faith. Its saints live reserved and austere. Let a brave, devout man spend the year in the woods of Maine or Labrador, and see if the Hebrew Scriptures speak adequately to his condition and experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Humor does not wear well. It is commonly enough said, that a joke will not bear repeating. The deepest humor will not keep. Humors... do not circulate, but stagnate, or circulate partially. In the oldest literature, in the Hebrew, the Hindoo, the Persian, the Chinese, it is rarely humor, even the most divine, which still survives, but the most sober and private, painful or joyous thoughts, maxims of duty, to which the life of all men may be referred. After time has sifted the literature of a people, there is left only their SCRIPTURE, for that is WRITING, par excellence. This is as true of the poets, as of the philosophers and moralists by profession; for what subsides in any of these is the moral only, to reappear as dry land at some remote epoch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, i...n order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Isra...el, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righ...teousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost ideas with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.... Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking; the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hebraism contains no eternal realm of essence, which Greek philosophy was to fabricate, through Plato, as affording the intellectu...al deliverance from the evil of time. Such a realm of eternal essences is possible only for a detached intellect, one who, in Plato's phrase, becomes a "spectator of all time and all existence." This ideal of the philosopher as the highest human type--the theoretical intellect who from the vantage point of eternity can survey all time and existence--is altogether foreign to the Hebraic concept of the man of faith who is passionately committed to his own mortal being. Detachment was for the Hebrew an impermissible state of mind, a vice rather than a virtue; or rather it was something that Biblical man was not yet even able to conceive, since he had not reached the level of rational abstraction of the Greek. His existence was too earth-bound, too laden with oppressive images of mortality, to permit him to experience the philosopher's detachment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »