Rensselaer Republican, Volume 14, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 August 1882 — SUNDAY THOUGHTS. [ARTICLE]

SUNDAY THOUGHTS.

Whoever is suspicious incites treason. Hope is a fatigue ending in a deception. Beauty without grace is a hook without bait. The stoutest heart loses hope under, repeated defeat. What seems only ludicrous is sometimes very serious. An idle man is like stagnant water; he corrupts himself. 'Love is like a squirrel: at onoe enterprising and timid. A truth that one does not understand beohmes an error. In your Christian aspirations be heroes.—John R. Paxton. Christianity teaches lowly oontentment and lofty charity. Christ is the contemporary of all the ages.—J. P. Newman. Recollection is the only paradise out of wbion we can be driven. The energies of the soul slumber in the vague reveries of hope. Justice is the bread of nations; they are always famishing for it. In this world one must put cloaks on all truth*, even the nicest. Ail truth* sre not to be uttered; still, it is always good to hear them. Gentle msnners in a lady are worth all the beauty that was ever seen. Bold, cheerful leadership, not denunciatiou, is the need of tne day. Fear of hypocrites and fools is the great plague of thinking and writing. Strong thoughts are iron nails driven in the mind that nothing can draw out. Forgiveness is almost indifference; while love lasts forgiveness is impossible. The love of God imposes on us no impossible conditions.—Frank E. Clark. We salute more willingly an acquaintance in a carriage than a friend on foot. Often the virtue of a woman must be very great, since it has to suffice for two. There are people who feed themselves with tneir grief until they get fat on it. Every one of our actions hie rewarded or punished, only we do not admit it. The most completely lost of all days is the one on which we have not thought. We must laugh before we are happy, lest we should die without having laughed. When we say theTe is nothing new under the sun. we do not oount forgotten things. We do not judge men by what they are in themselves, but what they are relatively to us. Can one better expiate his sins than by enlisting his experience in the service of morals? Infidelity builds no homes or ternEles. It only destroys, tears down omes and temples. We require an inner life, not mere action, bat life, the life of life, not life from galvanism. Do not feel proud at having sup ported your misfortune. How could you not have supported it?

In great suffering you shut yourself up like an oyster. To open your heart by force would be to kill you. Take up one by one the plain, prao tical duties that lie closest to your hand and perform them as fast as you can. There is but one happiness—duty. There is but one consolation—work. There is but one enjoyment—the beautiful. Instead of complaining of the thorns among the roses, we should be thankful there are roses among the thorns. The song of the nightingale and the howling or cats are two manners of expressing the same feeling; but they are not mutually intelligible. From selfishness men make severer laws for women than for themselves, without suspecting that by so doing they raise them above themselves. In youth grief is a tempest which makes you ill; in old age it is only a cold wind which adds a wrinkle to your face and one white lock to the others. Melancholy, when it is not a physical languor, is a kind of convalescence during which one thinks one’s self much more ill than during the illness. Th is is one of the sad conditions of life, that experience is not transmissible. No man will learn from the sufferings of another—he must suffer himself. Holiness is power. Tie poorest man who is gre it in prayer, is perhaps a greater man in affeotlng the destinies of the world than the Emperor of Russia. Suffering is a heavy plough driven by an iron band. The harder and more rebellious the soil the more it is turned, the richer and softer the deeper it is cut into. Suffering is our most faithful friend; it is always returning. Often it has changed its dress and even its face; but we can easily recognize it by its cordial and intimate embrace.