Great Throughts Treasury

"There was plainly wanting a divine revelation to recover mankind out of their universal corruption and degeneracy."

"A blind or deaf man has infinitely more reason to deny the being, or the possibility of the being, of light or sounds than an atheist can have to deny or doubt of the existence of God."

"Bearing up against temptations and prevailing over them is the very thing wherein the whole life of religion consists. It is the trial which God puts upon us in this world, by which we are to make evidence of our love and obedience to him, and of our fitness to be made members of his kingdom."

"Beyond all credulity is the credulousness of atheists, who believe that chance could make the world, when it cannot build a house."

"Faith is that conviction upon the mind of the truth of the promises and threatenings of God made known in the gospel; of the certain reality of the rewards and punishments of the life to come, which enables a man, in opposition to all the temptations of a corrupt world, to obey God, in expectation of an invisible reward hereafter."

"Many who are very just in their dealings between man and man will yet be very fraudulent or rapacious with regard to the public."

"Since, therefore, neither the foreknowledge of God nor the liberty of man can, without a plain contradiction, be denied, it follows unavoidably that the foreknowledge of God must be of such a nature as is not inconsistent with the liberty of man."

"There is no such thing as what men commonly call the course of nature, or the power of nature. The course of nature, truly and properly speaking, is nothing else but the will of God producing certain effects in a continued, regular, constant, and uniform manner,—which course or manner of acting, being in every movement perfectly arbitrary, is as easy to be altered any time as to be preserved."

"Virtue and true goodness, righteousness and equity, are things truly noble and excellent, lovely and venerable in themselves."