High to make His purposes felt in every heart as truly as He makes His
sun to shine on the just and the unjust. The church first consigns men
to perdition and then wonders why they are reluctant to walk with it
the other way. So long as you have faith in total depravity you will
find some facts to substantiate it.

But there is a better way. Sympathy with men will do more for them
than sermons on their sins. Look for the best in them and you will
find things better than you expected. There are flower beds as well as
garbage heaps in every heart; at least, there are spots where seeds of
the fairest flowers of heaven may be sown.

You do not have to be a fool to have faith in your fellows. You do not
need to take the padlocks off your house; but you do need to take them
off your heart. There may be those whom it would be wrong to trust
with your cash box; but it is a greater wrong to withhold from them
your kindness. You can show them that you believe the best instead of
the worst of them.

The great Teacher told men that He came not to condemn but to give
life. His followers have too often occupied themselves wholly with
condemnation and then wondered that their sentences saved none. Every
soul knows its own sentence; what it needs to feel is that God and all
good men are with it, helping it to shake off that sentence, to arise
and return to the Father, that, instead of all things conspiring to
keep a man down, there is a cloud of witnesses cheering him on, a
mighty choir invisible inspiring his heart. And there is nothing any
man can do of greater worth to the world than to cheer on another by
his faith in him, his high expectation of him, his wise blindness to
some little faults, and his propagating approval of the least