A Thousand Thoughts from Various Authors, Selected and Arranged by A.B. Davison

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1880 Excerpt: ... inordinate elation of the mind, proceeding from a false conceit of men's excellency in things honoured. Hooker, Sermons, iii. PROFESSIONS. As for men's employments and preferments, every man that sets forth into the world comes into a great lottery, and draws some one certain profession to act and live by, but knows not the fortune that will attend him in it. One man perhaps proves miserable in the study of the law, who might have flourished in that of physic or divinity. Another runs his head against the pulpit, who might have been very serviceable to his country at the plough. And a third proves a very dull and heavy philosopher, who possibly would have made a good mechanic, and have done well enough at the useful philosophy of the spade or the anvil. South, Sermon on Prov. xvi. 33. PROPHECY. This sweet stream of the doctrine (of the prophets) did, as the rivers, make its own banks fertile and pleasant as it ran by, and flowed still onward to after ages, and by the confluence of more such prophecies grew greater as it went till it fell in with the main current of the Gospel in the New Testament, both acted and preached by the great Prophet himself whom they foretold to come, and recorded by his apostles and evangelists, and thus united into one river clear as crystal. This doctrine of salvation in the Scripture hath still refreshed the city of God, his church under the gospel, and still shall do so, till it empty itself into the ocean of eternity.' Leighton. 1 'In the whole course of my studies I do not remember to have read so beautiful an allegory as this, so various and detailed, and yet so just and so natural.' Coleridge. PSALMS. Composed upon particular occasions, yet designed for general use; delivered out as services for Israelites under the law, y...