Oh, remember this, the sweetness of religion is incomparably more than all the pleasures of sense.

If it is not strong upon your heart to practice what you read, to what end do you read? To increase your own condemnation? If your light and knowledge be not turned into practice, the...

O Time the fatal wrack of mortal things,That draws oblivion’s curtains over kings;Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not,Their names without a record are forgot,Their parts, their ports, their pomps all laid in th’ dustNor...

Self is the only oil that makes the chariot-wheels of the hypocrite move in all religious concerns.

…And although thus short, we shorten many ways,Living so little while we are alive;In eating, drinking, sleeping, vain delightSo unawares comes on perpetual night,And puts all pleasures vain unto eternal flight.

The best course to prevent falling into the pit is to keep at the greatest distance from it; he who will be so bold as to attempt to dance upon the brink of the pit,...

People will have their excitements, and a good rousing persecution used to stir things like the burning of Chicago or a Presidential election in our day.

Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it–later in life he almost completely slew it–but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys… unscrupulousness… the...

He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.

Christian, how did you enjoy comfort before? Was the creature anything to you but a conduit, a pipe, that conveyed God’s goodness to you? ‘The pipe is cut off,’ says God, ‘come to me, the...

O my Mansoul, I have lived, I have died, I live, and I will die no more for thee. I live that thou mayest not die. Because I live thou shalt live also; I reconciled...

God is the highest good of the reasonable creature. The enjoyment of him is our proper; and is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy...

…the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than...