"Americans do not presume to equate God's purposes with any purpose of our own...."[Prayer] teaches us to trust, to accept that God's plan unfolds in his time, not our own.
Wherever there is evil and wherever there is ignorance and want of knowledge, I have found out by experience that all evil comes, as our scriptures say, relying upon differences, and that all good comes from faith in equality, in the underlying sameness and oneness of things. This is the great Vedantic ideal.
In your intercourse with sects, the sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the Church; but the faith of the individual, centred in his heart, is, or may be, collateral to them. Faith is subjective.
The Tempter masters the lazy and irresolute man who dwells on the attractive side of things, ungoverned in his senses, and unrestrained in his food, like the wind overcomes a rotten tree. But the Tempter cannot master a man who dwells on the distasteful side of things, self-controlled in his senses, moderate in eating, resolute and full of faith, like the wind cannot move a mountain crag.
Faith, faith, faith in ourselves, faith, faith in God, this is the secret of greatness.If you have faith in all the three hundred and thirty millions of your mythological Gods, and in all the Gods which foreigners have now and again introduced into your midst, and still have no faith in yourselves, there is no salvation for you.
Give up the awful disease that is creeping into our national blood, that idea of ridiculing everything, that loss of seriousness. Give that up. Be strong and have this Shraddha, and everything else is bound to follow.
"Americans do not presume to equate God's purposes with any purpose of our own...."[Prayer] teaches us to trust, to accept that God's plan unfolds in his time, not our own.
The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house - this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is not the world's desire.