What an abyss between my deep misery and the eternal kingdom of Christ, which is proclaimed, loved and adored, and which is extended over the whole earth.

Call you this dying?
Is it not rather living?
The death of Christ is the death of a God." "No true man can live a half life," says Phillips Brooks, "when he has genuinely learned that it is a half life.

The other half, the higher half, must haunt him." "Ideality," says Horace Mann, "is only the _avant courier_ of the mind; and where that in a healthy and normal state goes I hold it to be a prophecy that realization can follow." "If the certainty of future fame bore Milton rejoicing through his blindness, or cheered Galileo in his dungeon," writes Bulwer, "what stronger and holier support shall not be given to him who has loved mankind as his brothers and devoted his labors to their cause ?--who has not sought, but relinquished, his own renown ?--who has braved the present censures of men for their future benefit, and trampled upon glory in the energy of benevolence?
Will there not be for him something more powerful than fame to comfort his sufferings and to sustain his hopes ?" "If I live," wrote Rufus Choate in his diary in September, 1844, "all blockheads which are shaken at certain mental peculiarities shall know and feel a reasoner, a lawyer and a man of business." I have read that none of the humbler races have the muscle by which man turns his eye upward, though I am not anatomist enough to be sure of the fact.
"Show me a contented slave," says Burke, "and I will show you a degraded man." "They truly are faithful," says one writer, "who devote their entire lives to amendment." General Grant said of the Chinese Wall: "I believe that the labor expended on this wall could have built every railroad in the United States, every canal and highway, and most, if not all, our cities." "The real benefactors of mankind," says Emerson, "are the men and women who can raise their fellow beings out of the world of corn and money, who make them forget their bank account by interesting them in their higher selves; who can raise mere money-getters into the intellectual realm, where they will cease to measure greatness and happiness by dollars and cents; who can make men forget their stomachs and feast on being's banquet." "Men are not so much mistaken in desiring to advance themselves," said Beecher, "as in judging what will be an advance, and what the right method of obtaining it.

An ambition which has conscience in it will always be a laborious and faithful engineer, and will build the road and bridge the chasms between itself and eminent success by the most faithful and minute performances of duty.

The liberty to go higher than we are is given only when we have fulfilled amply the duty of our present sphere.