Fellows of colleges in the universities are in one sense the recipients of alms, because they receive funds which originally were of an eleemosynary character.
If you wish to assured of the truth of Christianity, try it. Believe, and if thy belief be right, that insight which gradually transmutes faith into knowledge will be the reward of thy belief.
Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts,--the first and the wisest of beasts, it may be, but still true beasts. We shall only differ in degree and not in kind,--just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of the materialists of all the schools, or almost all, we are not of the same kind as beasts, and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of the soul within us that makes the difference.
Great old books of the great old authors are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have neither time nor means to get his own belief.
The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect.
There are errors which no wise man will treat with rudeness while there is a probability that they may be the refraction of some great truth still below the horizon.
The age seems sore from excess of stimulation, just as a day or two after a thorough Debauch and long sustained Drinking-match a man feels all over like a Bruise. Even to admire otherwise than on the whole and where "I admire" is but a synonyme for "I remember, I liked it very much when I was reading it ," is too much an effort, would be too disquieting an emotion!
Not the poem which we have read , but that to which we return , with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry .