George F. Hoar

He will have a high and a permanent place in literature, which none but Defoe shares.

It is the history of such a nation as Milton conceived, led and guided by men whom Milton would have loved.

The history he loves and has helped to write and to make is not the history of a base and mean people, who have drifted by accident into empire.

He does not fancy that he loves his country, while he dislikes and despises his countrymen and everything they have done and are doing.

He has taught us that the fatherhood and tenderness of God are manifested here and now in this world, as they will be hereafter; that the religion of Christ is a religion of daily living; that salvation is the purifying of the soul from…

Edward Everett Hale has been the interpreter of a pure, simple loving and living faith to thousands and thousands of souls.

It was an assertion of the great doctrine, never till of late perfectly comprehended anywhere, that the Saviour of men came into the world inspired by the love of sinners, and not for an elect and an exclusive brotherhood of saints.

But still, without making proclamation, he has been the founder of a school which has enlarged and broadened the Church into the Congregation, and which has brought the whole Congregation into the Church.

He has never been a builder of partition walls.

The message may be read by a million eyes and reach a million souls.

Every man knows from whom it comes, and hails it as a special message to himself.

No mask, no shrinking modesty can hide the individuality.

The message is inspired and tinctured and charged and made electric with the quality of the individual soul.

There is once in a while, through the quality is rare, an author, a historian, or a writer of fiction, or a preacher, or a pastor, or an orator or poet, or an influential or beloved citizen, who in everything he says or does seems to be…

We are prouder of our citizenship because he is our fellow citizen; and we feel that his life and his writing, both alike, spur us steadily to fresh effort toward high thinking and right living.

I have learned of him the great virtue of Hope; to judge of mankind by their merits and not their faults; to understand that the great currents of history, especially in a republic, more especially in our Republic, are determined by great…

I believe, finally, whatever clouds may darken the horizon, that the world is growing better, that to-day is better than yesterday, and to-morrow will be better than to-day.

I believe that the moral law and the Golden Rule are for nations as well as for individuals.

I believe that a Republic is greater than an Empire.

I believe that liberty, good government, free institutions, cannot be given by any one people to any other, but must be wrought out for each by itself, slowly, painfully, in the process of years or centuries, as the oak adds ring to ring.

I believe that the God who created this world has ordained that his children may work out their own salvation and that his nations may work out their own salvation by obedience to his laws without any dictation or coercion from any other.

I believe in God, the living God, in the American people, a free and brave people, who do not bow the neck or bend the knee to any other, and who desire no other to bow the neck or bend the knee to them.

I have no faith in fatalism, in destiny, in blind force.

The contrast between the teacher of hope and the teacher of despair is to be found in the pessimism of Carlyle and the serene cheerfulness of Emerson.

A world wherein there is no hope is a world where there is no virtue.