Your ShelfYour Projects

GEMS FROM CHANNING

25%

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 9, 1879

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 54, No. 16.

Read the full edition

GEMS FROM CHANNING.

ONE great and kindling thought from a retired and obscure man, may live when thrones are fallen, and the memory of those who filled them obliterated, and like an undying fire may illuminate and quicken all future generations.
A HUMBLE spire, pointing heavenward from an obscure church, speaks of man's nature, man's dignity, man's destiny, more eloquently than all the columns and arches of Greece and Rome, the mausoleums of Asia, or the pyramids of Egypt.
GOD be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers. They give to all who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am. No matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling. If the sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise, or Shakspeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship; and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live.