George F. Hoar

Want of hope means either distrust of God or a belief in the essential baseness of man or both.

People of free countries will not tolerate a fiction which teaches that in the end evil is triumphant and virtue is wretched.

With Hope, as we have defined it,--namely, the confident expectation of the final triumph of righteousness,--we are but a little lower than the angels; without it we are but a kind of vermin.

The Apostle of your doleful gospel must preach quite another Evangel: And now abideth Hate, and now abideth Wrath, and now abideth Despair, and now abideth Woe unutterable.

Who can trust the promise of a God who has created a Universe and peopled it with fiends?

Mighty Jonathan Edwards,--the only genius since Dante akin to Dante,--could you not see that, if your world exist where there is no hope and where there is no love, there can be no faith?

It has no place in a theology which believes in the final perdition of the larger number of mankind.

Hope is that attribute of the soul which believes in the final triumph of righteousness.

Hope is for beings without the strength of omnipotence.

Faith is for beings without the certainty of omniscience.

It sums up the whole duty and the whole destiny of man: 'And now abideth Faith, Hope, and Charity,--these three.' If Faith, Hope, and Charity abide, then Humanity abides.

There are two great texts in the Scripture in whose sublime phrases are contained the germs of all religion, whether natural or revealed.

It was said of Cromwell by his secretary that hope shone in him like a fiery pillar when it had gone out in every other.

It is a special quality and characteristic of Unitarianism that Unitarians everywhere lay special emphasis upon the virtue of Hope.

The difference between Christian sects, like the difference between individual Christians, is not so much in the matter of belief or disbelief of portions of the doctrine of the Scripture as in the matter of emphasis.

Still less could I speak adequately of the men and women who, in almost every neighborhood throughout the country, have found in this Unitarian faith of ours a stimulant to brave and noble lives and a sufficient comfort and support in the…

If we would blot out Unitarianism from the history of the country, we must erase the names of many famous statesmen, many famous philanthropists, many great reformers, many great orators, many famous soldiers, from its annals, and nearly…

I think there can be found in this country no sectarianism so narrow, so hide-bound, so dogma-clad, that it would like to blot out from the history of the country what the men of our faith have contributed to it.

But they do understand the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, and they know and they love and they practise the great virtues which the Apostle tells us are to abide.

They do not attribute any magic virtue to the laying on of hands; nor do they believe that the traces of an evil life in the soul can be washed out by the sprinkling of a few drops of water, however pure, or by baptism in any blood…

There are men and women for whom Faith, Hope, and Charity forever abide; to whom Judea's news are still glad tidings; who believe that one day Jesus Christ came to this earth, bearing a Divine message and giving a Divine example.

No Five Points, no Athanasian Creed, no Thirty-nine Articles, separate the men and women of our way of thinking from humanity or from Divinity.

I think, also, that the things we are to be glad of and to be proud of and are to be thankful for are not those things that separate us from the great body of Christians or the great body of believers in God and in righteousness, but in…

The great things of the universe are not to be defined.

To define is to bound, to enclose, to set limit.