No, it is something else than circumstances which makes us do God's
will, just as it is something else than miracle which makes us believe
His word. Miracle and circumstances do their part. They assist the
heart; they make the task of the will easier; they do not compel
obedience. He who has made us free respects our freedom even when we
use it against Himself--even when we resist His own must gracious and
gentle pressure and choose to disbelieve or to disobey Him. If Moses and
the prophets are to persuade us--if we are not to be beyond persuasion,
tho one rose from the dead--there must be that inward seeking, yearning
after God, that wholeness of heart, that tender and affectionate
disposition toward Him who is the end as He is the source of our
existence, of which the Bible is so full from first to last--which is
the very essence of religion--which He, its object and its author, gives
most assuredly to all who ask Him. HENRY PARRY LIDDON.

From Sermon, "The Adequacy of Present Opportunities."

* * * * *

Instantly under such an influence you ascend above the smoke and stir of
this small local strife; you tread upon the high places of the earth and
of history; you think and feel as an American for America; her power,
her eminence, her consideration, her honor, are yours; your competitors,
like hers, are kings; your home, like hers, is the world; your path,
like hers, is on the highway of empires; our charge, her charge, is of
generations and ages; your record, her record, is of treaties, battles,
voyages, beneath all the constellations; her image, one, immortal,
golden, rises on your eye as our western star at evening rises on the
traveler from his home; no lowering cloud, no angry river, no lingering
spring, no broken crevasse, no inundated city or plantation, no tracts