Extemporaneous discourses Author:Edwin Hubbell Chapin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. GOD'S REQUIREMENTS, And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to lovs mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God... more » ? — Mioah vi. 8. consummate result of all education consists in JL the power of applying a few scientific principles. All the possibilities of literature are enfolded in the alphabet. The most abstruse and bewildering calculations, ciphering up in columns and platoons of figures, are only the combination of familiar units. Out of one clear rule or method spring all the products of this branching and luxuriant science. So the highest art and achievement of man's life is but the flowering of one or two germinal truths. Stately philosophies and complex creeds may be reduced to a proposition that can be written in the palm of the hand. So far as they are genuine, so far as they have any real force to help us concerning the great end of our being, thisis the sum and substance of them all; they are reducible in the last analysis to this : " Do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God." These, you will see at once, are requirements very easy to understand—worth whole tons of sermons and dissertations. These, the wayfaring man, though a fool, may comprehend. And yet, my friends, these are precepts which whole tons of sermons and dissertations, somehow or another, have not yet made practical in the hearts and lives of men. It is the application of the theory that is requisite; for there is a vast difference between principles to be applied, and the power of applying principles; just as there is a difference between the alphabet and the Iliad of Homer; between the first signs in algebra and the calculations of Leibnitz ; between the school-boy's lesson and the achievements of Newton. Anybody can read the propositions ...« less