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

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.

Faith is for beings without the certainty of omniscience.

Hope is for beings without the strength of omnipotence.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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 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 a Republic is greater than an Empire.

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

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 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…

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.

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…

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