ACHES. ACHES-the Result of Disease. A sudden and a swift disease First on the heart, Life's chiefest fort, does seize, And then on all the suburb vitals preys; And scatters poison through its purple flood: Sharp aches in thick troops it sends, And pain which like a rack the nerves extends.-OLDHAM. ACQUAINTANCE-worth Cherishing. Acquaintance, born and nourished in Adversity, is worth the cherishing; 'Tis proved steel which one may trust one's life to.-J. S. KNOWLES. ACQUAINTANCE.-A Miserly I believe he would be willing to take the beam out of his own eye, if he knew he could sell the timber.-FOOTE. ACQUAINTANCE.-Need for making If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man should keep his friendship in constant repair.— DR. JOHNSON. ACQUIREMENT.-The Term It is used in opposition to natural gifts; as, eloquence and skill in music and painting are acquirements; genius-the gift of nature. It denotes especially personal attainments.-DR. WEBSTER. ACQUISITION.-Risks attending every Every noble acquisition is attended with its risks: he who fears to encounter the one, must not expect to obtain the other.METASTASIO. ACQUISITIONS.-Great To make great acquisitions can happen to very few.-DR. JOHNSON. ACRIMONY.-The Growth of A just reverence of mankind prevents the growth of acrimony and brutality.SHAFTESBURY. ACT.-A Right A right act strikes a chord that extends through the whole universe, touches all inoral intelligence, visits every world, vibrates along its whole extent, and conveys its vibrations to the very bosom of God!— BINNEY. ACTION. ACTING.-The Interim between ACTION-Defined. Action is, so to speak, the genius of nature.-DR. BLAIR. ACTION-the Destiny of Man. Action is at once the destiny and the lot of man. All the conditions of his existence are framed upon the supposition of his activity. It is so in man's physical frame. The elastic foot is for speed; the firm lithe limb for endurance; the arm, at once supple and sinewy, for toil; the eye and the ear are for their respective revelries in sight and sound. It is so in our mental constitution. By the active exercise of the powers which God has given us we classify objects and understand truths; we discriminate, we in. vent, we analyse, we compare, we combine. It is so in our moral nature. The power by which we distinguish between right and wrong; an instinct of worship, which, however we may brutalise, we cannot wholly stifle; yearnings after a nobler life, which no debauchery can extinguish nor murder absolutely kill these are all implanted within us by the Giver of every good and perfect gift.-PUNSHON. ACTION.-The Eloquence of When the action is natural and graceful, it is eloquent in a pre-eminent degree. -DR. DAVIES. ACTION-the End of Thought. Action is the end of all thought, but to act justly and effectively, you must think wisely.-LORD STANLEY. ACTION-cannot enforce Argument. Action can have no effect upon reasonable minds. It may augment noise, but it never can enforce argument. If you speak to a dog, you use action; you hold up your hand thus, because he is a brute; and in proportion as men are removed from brutes, action will have the less influence upon themDR. JOHNSON. ACTION.-Immediate Happy is he whose action is as quick as the impulse that calls for it!-whose daily obedience has in it the fresh colours of newborn convictions !-whose feet sound the echo of God's "Arise !"-DR. RALEIGH. ACTION. ACTION-makes the Orator. When Demosthenes was asked what was the first part of an orator, what the second, and what the third ? he answered-"Action." The same may I say, if any should ask me what is the first, the second, the third part of a Christian, I must answer-“Action."T. BROOKS. ACTION.-The Necessity of The fact is, that in order to do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand shivering on the bank, and thinking of the cold and the danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can It will not do to be perpetually calculating risks, and adjusting nice chances: it did all very well before the Flood, when a man could consult his friends upon an intended publication for a hundred and fifty years, and then live to see its success for six or seven centuries afterwards; but at present a man waits, and doubts, and hesitates, and consults his brother, and his uncle, and his first cousins, and his particular friends, till one fine day he finds that he is sixty-five years of age,-that he has lost so much time in consulting first cousins and particular friends, that he has no more time left to follow their advice.-S. SMITH. ACTIONS.-Bad The worst part of bad actions is-they make us worse.-DR. VINET. ACTIONS.-Brave Bent on deeds Of glory, but a votary at the shrine ACTIONS.-The Centre of our As all the rivers run into the sea, and all the lines meet in the centre, so all our actions terminate and centre in God.-T. WATSON. ACTIONS.-Conjectures respecting Our best conjectures, as to the true spring of actions, are very uncertain; the actions themselves are all we must pretend to know from history. That Cæsar was murdered by twenty-four conspirators, I doubt not; but I very much doubt whether their love of liberty was the sole cause.-CHESTER FIELD. ACTIONS.-Divine The mortal streams of divine actions flow only from the pure springs of divine affections.-W. SECKER. ACTIVITIES. ACTIONS.-Great Great actions are not always true sons S. BUTLER, ACTIONS.-The Immortality of our Our actions must clothe us with an immortality loathsome or glorious.-COLTON. ACTIONS.- Moral Moral actions may be done from natural principles, and will certainly centre in self, in some shape or other; but a truly Christian act must proceed from a gracious principle in the heart.-BOGATZKY. ACTIONS.-The Principles of The inward persuasion that we are free to do, or not to do a thing, is but a mere illusion. If we trace the true principles of our actions, we shall find that they are always necessary consequences of our volitions and desires, which are never in our power. You think yourself free, because you do what you will; but are you free to will, or not to will; to desire, or not to desire? Are not your volitions and desires necessarily excited by objects or qualities totally independent of you? But, you will say "I feel free." This is an illusion, that may be compared to that of the fly in the fable, who, lighting upon the pole of a heavy carriage, applauded himself for directing its course. Man who thinks himself free is a fly, who imagines he has power to move the universe, while he is himself unknowingly carried along by it.-BONSENS. ACTIONS.-The Return of Be vicious, and viciousness may go down as an heir-loom in half-a-hundred families; be inconsistent, and enmity to the Gospel may be propagated over a parish; give occasions of offence, and many may fall; those who are entering in the narrow way may be discouraged, and those who have already entered may be made to stumble. Ye live not for yourselves; ye cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects.-CANON MELVILL. ACTIVITIES.-A Man's The Jews compared a man with a fixed employment to "a vineyard fenced." A good comparison. A man's activities, ACTIVITY. within his proper calling, are not like trees scattered up and down the wayside, or over the wilderness, when much of the fruit is lost; but like well-planted and welltrained vines in a garden, where the most is made of them, and they are all husbanded and preserved.-STOUGHTON. ACTIVITY-impressed on Man. While all around are working, from the wavelet's tiniest ripple and from the rosebud's heart, ever glowing into deeper crimson, to the tireless ocean and the menial and monarch sun; whilst unwearied labour was the condition of Paradise, and angels cease not in their ministry, and there is no faltering in the march of the heavens, and the Son went about doing good, and the Eternal Father, the Watchman of Israel, neither slumbereth nor sleepeth, you will not wonder that, by a law as benign as it is authoritative, God has impressed activity upon His favourite creature-man, and has provided that his shall not be a zoophite existence, clinging in blind helplessness as a parasite to its guardian rock, but a life beautiful and holy, a life of quickened pulses, and an activity and an energy of which insensate matter knows not; and finding, in the rapturous doing of every day life, its very soul and essence of joy.PUNSHON. ACTIVITY.-Literary You must act : inactive contemplation is a dangerous condition for minds of profound moral sensibility. We are not to dream away our lives in the contemplation of distant or imaginary perfection. We are to act in an imperfect and corrupt world; and we must only contemplate perfection enough to ennoble our natures, but not to make us dissatisfied and disgusted with these faint approaches to that perfection, which it would be the nature of a brute or a demon to despise. It is for this reason that I exhort you to literary activity. It is not as the road of ambition, but of duty, and as the means of usefulness and the resource against disease. It is an exercise necessary to your own health, and by which you directly serve others.-MACK ADAM AND EVE. ACTOR.-The Emotion of an Betterton, although his countenance was ruddy and sanguine, when he performed Hamlet, through the violent and sudden emotion of amazement and horror at the presence of his father's spectre, instantly turned as white as his neckcloth, while his whole body seemed to be affected with a strong tremor: had his father's apparition actually risen before him, he could not have been seized with more real agonies. struck the spectators so forcibly, that they felt a shuddering in their veins, and participated in the astonishment and the horror so apparent in the actor!-I. DISRAELI. ACTOR.-The, Individuality of the This Even under his borrowed guise the actor belongs to himself. He has put on a mask, beneath it his real face still exists; he has thrown himself into a foreign individuality, which in some sense forms a shelter to the integrity of his own character; he may indeed wear festive attire, but his mourning is beneath it; he may smile, divert, act, his soul is still his own; his inner life is undisturbed; no indiscreet question will lift the veil, no coarse hand will burst open the gates of the sanctuary.-GASPARIN. ACTORS.-Rules for Rules may teach us not to raise the arms above the head; but if passion carries them, it will be well done: passion knows more than art.-BARON. ACTORS.-Tragic Tragic actors should be nursed on the lap of queens!-BARON. ACUTENESS.-Intellectual Mere intellectual acuteness, divested as it is, in too many cases, of all that is comprehensive and great and good, is to me more revolting than the most helpless, seeming to be almost like the spirit of Mephistopheles.-DR. ARNOLD. ADAM AND EVE. All kind ADAPTATION-Universal. Throughout the universe there is a wonderful proportioning of one thing to another. The size of animals, of man especially, when considered with respect to other animals, or to the plants which grow around him, is such as a regard to his conveniency would have pointed out. A giant or a pigmy could not have milked goats, reaped corn, or mowed grass; a giant could not have rode a horse, trained a vine, or shorn a sheep, with the same bodily ease as we do, if at all. A pigmy would have been lost amongst rushes, or carried off by birds of prey.-ADN. PALEY. ADDRESS.-A Good Ofttimes a good address carries with it infinitely greater weight than the soundest logic or the loftiest eloquence.-DR. DAVIES. ADJECTIVE.-Language Indebted to the Language has as much occasion to adjective the distinct signification of the verb, and to adjective also the mood, as it has to adjective time. It has adjectived all three.-TOOKE The fireside, on a winter evening, was a scene highly picturesque, and worthy of the pencil of Wilkie. The veteran sat in his easy chair, surrounded by his children. A few grey hairs peeped from beneath his hat, worn somewhat awry, which gave an arch turn to the head, which it seldom quitted. The anchor button, and scarlet waistcoat trimmed with gold, marked the fashion of former times. Before him lay his book, and at his side a glass prepared by the careful hand of a daughter, who devoted herself to him with a tenderness peculiarly delightful to the infirmities of age. The benevolent features of the old man were slightly obscured by the incense of a cigárre," which spread its fragrance in long wreaths of smoke around himself and the whole apartment. A footstool supported his wounded leg, beneath which lay the old and faithful dog stretched on the hearth. Portraits of King Charles the First and Van Tromp (indicating the characteristic turn of his mind) appeared above the chimneypiece; and a multitude of prints of British heroes covered the rest of the wainscot. knot of antique swords and Indian weapons garnished the old-fashioned pediment of the door; a green curtain was extended across the room, to fence off the cold air, to which an old sailor's constitution is particularly sensitive. Such was the picture. If benevolence was the striking feature of his disposition, religion was the guide of his conduct, the anchor of his hope, the stay of all his confidence. There was an habitual energy in his private devotions, which proved the firm hold which Christianity had obtained over his mind. Whether in reading or in conversation, at the name of God he instantly uncovered his head, by a spontaneous movement of A ADMIRATION. religious feeling. Nothing but illness ever kept him from church. His example there was a silent reproof to the idle and indifferent. I see him still in imagination, kneeling, unconscious of all around him, absorbed in earnest prayer, and though his features were concealed, the agitation of his venerable head indicated the fervour of his supplications. The recollection has often quickened my own indolence. Such was the man whose memory was endeared to all who knew his worth, affording us a beautiful example of a true old English officer.-LOCKER. ADMIRATION.-Pleasure in There is a pleasure in admiration; and this is that which properly causeth admiration-when we discover a great deal in an object which we understand to be excellent; and yet we see more beyond that, which our understandings cannot fully reach and comprehend.-ABP. TILLOTSON. ADMIRATION AND ADORATION. The difference between admiration and adoration is observable in the difference of their respective objects; and that difference is immeasureable. For, speaking strictly, we admire the finite; we adore the Infinite.-CANON LIDDON. ADMIRATION AND LOVE. Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgment and friendship like being enlivened.DR. JOHNSON. ADMONITION.-Private Private admonition is rather a proof of benevolence than of malevolence. It was the saying of Austin, when his hearers resented his frequent reproofs-" Change your conduct, and I will change my conversation."-W. SECKER. ADOPTION--by God. Divine adoption is an act of God, whereby He does judicially take and constitute those that are by nature strangers to Him, and none of His family, members of His family and His own children, giving them the privileges of His children, or of His house as children.-BOSTON. ADOPTION-among Men. Adoption among men is an act by which a man takes the child of another, and places it in the condition of his own child, to be in every respect from thenceforth as his own, with all the rights, and privileges, and obligations, and duties of a child. The inducement to such an act is the kind |