The only human beings I have thoroughly admired and respected in the world have been those who carried the load of the world with ...a smile, and who, in the face of anxieties that would have knocked me clean out, never showed a tremor. Such men and women end by owning us, soul and body, and our allegiance can never be shaken. We are only too glad to be owned. Religion is nothing but this.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrine... for a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the earl...y Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring,--scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power,--while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"If she belongs to any besides the present, it is to the next world which artists want to see, when paganism will come again and w...e can give a divinity to every waterfall."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Reverend Samuel Peters ... exaggerated the Blue Laws, but they did include "Capital Lawes" providing a death penalty for any c...hild over sixteen who was found guilty of cursing or striking his natural parents; a death penalty for an incorrigible son; a law forbidding smoking except in a room in a private house; another law declaring smoking illegal except on a journey five miles away from home,...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
John Eliot came to preach to the Podunks in 1657, translated the Bible into their language, but made little progress in aboriginal... soul-saving. The Indians answered his pleas with: 'No, you have taken away our lands, and now you wish to make us a race of slaves.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By 1879, seven churches of various denominations were holding services, which led the local Chronicle to comment, "All have but on...e religion and one God in common; it is the Crucified Carbonate."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[T]he minister preached a sermon on Jonah and the whale, at the end of which an old chief arose and declared, "We have heard sever...al of the white people talk and lie; we know they will lie, but this is the biggest lie we ever heard."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Passing through here in 1795, Bishop Asbury commented, 'The country improves in cultivation, wickedness, mills, and stills.' Five ...years later, he held a meeting in the neighborhood and remarked that he thought most of the congregation had come to look at his wig.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »