Best Thoughts of the Best Men.

Auckland Star, Volume XXI, Issue 4124, 22 September 1883, Page 5 (Supplement)

Best Thoughts of the Best Men.

Religiox is our life, being essential to our peace of mind, our support under the trials of life, and our fitness for the eternal world. Love for one's kind is the keystone of the whole arch of Christian practice, and no social sophistries founded on artificial arrangements can do away with it. Life is warfare, and those who climb steep paths and go through dangerous enterprises are the brave men and leaders ; but to rest basely at the cost of others' labours is to be a coward, safe, because despised.

It is astonishing how much we all go about with our eyes open, and yet sco nothing. This is because the organ of vision, like other organs, requires training, and, by lack of training and by slavish dependence on books, becomes dull and ultimately incapable of exercising its natural function.

What is religion ? Kindness to creatures. What is happiness ? The healthiness of a living being in this world. What is kindness '! Good nature. What is wisdom ? Discrimination.

Men and statues that are admired in an elevated situation have a very different effect upon us when we approach them ; the first appears less than wo imagined them, the last bigger. If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring and youth, the former from the year, and the "latter from the human life.

In learning what others have thought, it is -well to keep in practice the power of thinking for oneself; when an author has added to your knowledge, pause and consider if you can add nothing to his. It is a well-known pyschological fact that the conscience of children is formed by the influences that surround them, and" that their notions of good and evil are the result of the moral atmosphere they breathe. Unless we are prepared to assert that all goodness culminates in ourselves and recedes from others in exact proportion to their distance from us, we must admit that our feelings are large factors of injustice in the judgments that we arc all of us only too ready to form.

You find yourself refreshed by the presence of cheerful^people : why not make earnest effort to confer that pleasure on others ? You will find half the battle is gained if you never allow yourself to say anything gloomy.— Mrs L. ~M Child Forbear to offer an opinion on a subject of which you are ignorant, especially in the presence of those to whom it is familiar. If it be not always in your power to speak to the purpose, it certainly is to be silent, and, though thousands have remembered with pain their garrulity, few have had reason to repent their silence. "Men ! whoso boast it is that ye Came of fathers bravo and free. If there breathe on narth a slave, Are ye truly free and brave ? Tf ye do not feel the chain when it works a brother's pain. Are ye not base slaves indeed— Slaves unworthy to be freed ? Is txue freedom but to break 1' ctters for our own dear sake. And. with callous hearts forsot That wo owe mankind a debt? . No, true freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear. And with heart and hand to bo Earnest to make oth rs free.