God's word is:
'He who strives never perishes.'
I have implicit faith in that promise.
Though, therefore, from my weakness
I fail a thousand times, I shall not lose faith.
Charity is having patience with someone who has let us down. It is resisting the impulse to become offended easily. It is accepting weaknesses and shortcomings. It is accepting people as they truly are. It is looking beyond physical appearances to attributes that will not dim through time. It is resisting the impulse to categorize others.
It is one of the great weaknesses of reasonable men and women that they imagine that projects which fly in the face of commonsense are not serious or being seriously undertaken.
Let no one charge me with ever having abused or encouraged weakness or surrendered on matters of principle. But I have said, as I say again, that every trifle must not be dignified into a principle.
No action, whether foul or fair, Is ever done, but it leaves somewhere A record, written by fingers ghostly, As a blessing or a curse, and mostly In the greater weakness or greater strength Of the acts which follow it.
Even to this day it is easier than it ought to be for me to get a rise out of an American by telling him something about himself which is equally true about every human being on the face of the globe. He at once resents this as a disparagement and an assertion on my part that people in other parts of the globe are not like that, and are loftily superior to such weaknesses.