Page:Three Thousand Selected Quotations from Brilliant Writers.djvu/435

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NATURE.
427

The whole track of history is marked with the ruin of empires which having been founded in injustice, or perpetuated by wrong, were ultimately destroyed.


Sow but one seed of primal evil in the moral soil of a nation, it will grow to be a tree as broad as the sky,—to take fruitfulness from the earth wherein it is rooted, and to cover it instead with barrenness and gloom.


To avert national decay, then, the moral character must be guarded. The mighty heart of the nation must be kept sound, so that its pulses, when once roused, will, like the ocean in its strength, sweep all before it. So long as the moral tone is preserved, the sun of our glory will not set; there will come no national decay and death.


If the great questions of the beginning of this century were mainly political, those which will convulse the world at its close will be social.


NATURE.

Every object in nature is impressed with God's footsteps, and every day repeats the wonders of creation. There is not an object, be it pebble or pearl, weed or rose, the flower-spangled sward beneath, or the star-spangled sky above, not a worm or an angel, a drop of water or a boundless ocean, in which intelligence may not discern, and piety adore, the providence of Him who took our nature that He might save our souls.


He hath made every thing beautiful in his time.