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

46 LIFE THOUGHTS.
one of the disciples had not been a recording angel,
to preserve the odor and richness of every word of
Christ. When John says, " And there are also
many other things which Jesus did, the which, if
they should be written every one, I suppose that
even the world itself could not contain the books
that should be written," it affects me more profoundly than when I think of the destruction of
the Alexandrian Library, or the perishing of Grecian art in Athens or Byzantium. The creations
of Phidias were cold stone, overlaid by warm
thought; but Christ described his own creations
when he said, " The words that I speak unto you,
they are, life." The leaving out of these things
from the New Testament, though divinely wise,
seems, to my yearning, not so much the unaccomplishment of noble things, as the destruction of
great treasures, which had already had oral life,
but failed of incarnation in literature.
A CHURCH under the influence of veneration,
merely, is a court house; and the judge sits there,
and cold officers are standing by him, and men are
waiting to receive their sentence. God's church is
God's house; and God's house is our home; and a
Christian home ought to be bright, cheerfiul, and