Rain down your wisdom in sacred streams to carry me like an upturned leaf through the currents of this grey day.
The soul that is attached to anything, however much good there may be in it, will not arrive at the liberty of Divine union. For whether it be a strong wire rope or a slender and delicate thread that holds the bird, it matters not, if it really holds it fast; for until the cord be broken, the bird cannot fly.
Behold the man who shields his family from all suffering. Has not his body become a willing vessel for affliction? Without good men to hold it up, the family house will fall when misfortune descends.
One is absolutely sickened, not by crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
