Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.
I am concerned with only one thing, the moral and social conditions of my generation.
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
To be bound by hungers is a beautiful thing but to be bound by physical hungers only is too low a state for man.
No one who is in this world will deny that evils exist. What, then, do we say? That evil is not a living and animated substance, but a condition of the soul which is opposed to virtue and which springs up In the slothful because of their falling away from good.
Virtue is health, vice is sickness.
It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.
As to the pure all things are pure, even so to the impure all things are impure.
The state we find ourselves in is sinful quite independent of guilt.
IMPENITENCE, n. A state of mind intermediate in point of time between sin and punishment.
Happy is he who has gained the wealth of divine thoughts, wretched is he whose beliefs about the gods are dark.
If virtue accompany it, it is the heart's paradise; if vice associate it, it is the soul's purgatory.
But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?
This was the man, this Balaam, I say, was the man, who desired to die the death of the righteous, and that his last end might be like his; and this was the state of his mind when he pronounced these words.
Whatever Romney's failings, he certainly doesn't suggest that the United States is teetering on the brink of a moral cesspool.
This re-appearance of the doctrine of freewill serves to support that of the pretension of the natural man to be not irremediably fallen, for this is what such doctrine tends to. All who have never been deeply convicted of sin, all persons in whom this conviction is based on gross external sins, believe more or less in freewill
Among many parallels which men of imagination have drawn between the natural and moral state of the world, it has been observed that happiness as well as virtue consists in mediocrity.
I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor.
Purity is not imposed upon us as though it were a kind of punishment, it is one of those mysterious but obvious conditions of that supernatural knowledge of ourselves in the Divine, which we speak of as faith. Impurity does not destroy this knowledge, it slays our need for it.
It is remarkable how great an influence our clothes have on our moral state.
If man thinks about his physical or moral state he usually discovers that he is ill.
With regard to the moral and religious condition of the slaves, I cannot, either from what I observe, or from what is told me, consider it in any way gratifying.
