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

62 LIFE THOUGHTS.
IT is sometimes of God's mercy that men in the
eager pursuit of worldly aggrandizement are baffled; for they are very like a train going down an
inclined plane - putting on the brake is not pleasant, but it keeps the car on the track.
*To the end of the world the word garden shall
be sweeter than flower or fruit could make it; for
the Son of God, the fairest thing that ever grew,
was planted there, and sprang from thence in celestial bloom and glory.
MEN often think an institution to be good because
it has done good; but institutions are often only
another kind of national school book, whose object
it is to help the scholar to pass on and leave it
behind. Neither boys nor society are to be kept
forever in the hornbook. There must be, in any
healthful society, a process of absorption, or of reconstruction of its organizations. Principles never
change; their incarnations continually do. A society whose institutions are unchanging is itself
ungrowing. The living body alters. Only the
dead rest. That is a brave and good institution
which speedily digs its own grave.