Life thoughts, gathered from the extemporaneous discourses of Henry Ward Beecher. By one of his congregation.

LIFE THOUGHTS. 209
always been doing profusely above. Christ's life on
earth was not an official mission; it was a develop.
ment of his everlasting state; a dip to bring within our horizon those characteristics and attributes
which otherwise we could not comprehend;- God's
pilgrimage on earth as a shepherd, in search of his
wolf-imperilled fold. And when I look into his
life, I say to myself, "As tender as this, and yet on
earth? What is he now, then? If he was such
when imprisoned in the flesh, what is he now in the
full liberty and largeness of his heavenly state?"
How hateful is that religion which says, " Business is business, and politics are politics, and religion
is religion"! Religion is using every thing for God;
but many men dedicate business to the devil, and
politics to the devil, and shove religion into the
cracks and crevices of time, and make it the hypocritical outcrawling of their leisure and laziness.
As sometimes, when we go to our work in summer, we are annoyed by swarms of insects that fill
the air with murmurous buzz, and trouble the
eye and the ear, and offend every sense, so there
are some passages in the Bible so infested by com18*