Sermons addresses pastoral letters etc Author:Horatio Potter 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: SERMON. ISAIAH XXX. 15. In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength. These words (selected before I was aware they had been referred to on a r... more »ecent occasion,) express with singular aptness and beauty the spirit which should characterize the Christian in times of obloquy and persecution. When the testimony borne to great, but misunderstood and hated truth has awakened hostility, and stirred up round about him a vehement conflict between opposing principles, when nevertheless he has good reason to feel assured, that the cause most dear to him is a righteous cause, armed with invincible strength, and when, above all, he clearly perceives, that, in spite of clamor and misrepresentation, the march of that cause is onward and upward, that it is daily becoming a more powerful instrument of good to the world, he may well be content to leave passion and prejudice to expend and exhaust themselves as they may, while he moves steadily forward in silence, in quietness and in confidence, to discharge the duties, which pertain to that cause and to the other relations of life. To spend time in endeavoring to reason with those, who are in no condition to reason, or in opposing prejudices, whose extravagance is harmless, whose violence will speedily exhaust itself, is to waste that energy, which should be reserved for efforts more important to the truth we love and to the well-being of our fellow men, as well as more conducive to the peace and improvement of our own spirit. The primitive Christian saw that the Church grew and extended herself even while her members were being destroyed ; the blood of her martyrs turned into seed, from which she reaped new harvests of converts. Instead therefore of vainly attempting to clamor as loudly as her adversaries, she perceived that her st...« less