Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 12, 2025
Providence has not ordained a diversity of gifts for nothing, and it is only a narrow philosophy that takes offense at seeming contrarieties. The truer method, and the happier as well, is to like each according to its kind: to love that which is amiable, to admire that which is admirable, and to study that which is curious.
Then he thought how wise must be a God who, to work out his intent, would take all the conduct, good and bad, all the endeavours of all his children, in all their contrarieties, and out of them bring the right thing. If he knew such a God, one to trust in absolutely, he would lie still without one movement of fear, he would go to sleep without one throb of anxiety about any he loved!
In the Chateau of the Tuileries, for instance, I perceive the same jumble of contrarieties that marks the French character; the same whimsical mixture of the great and the little; the splendid and the paltry, the sublime and the grotesque. On visiting this famous pile, the first thing that strikes both eye and ear is military display.
Since, then, they will not depart from any of these contrarieties, but confess and hold them all, that those who are proceeding towards virtue are fools and vicious, that those who are become good and wise perceive not this change in themselves, and that there is a great difference between folly and wisdom, they must assuredly seem to you wonderfully to preserve an agreement in their doctrines, and yet more so in their conduct, when affirming all men who are not wise to be equally wicked, unjust, faithless, and fools, they on the other side abhor and detest some of them, nay, sometimes to such a degree that they refuse even to speak to them when they meet them, while others of them they trust with their money, choose to offices, and take for husbands to their daughters.
I can not tell you how many motives, there are so many. The human heart is an insolvable enigma. It is a whimsical combination of all the known contrarieties. We think we know its workings; we see their effects; we ignore the cause. If it expresses its sentiments sincerely, even that sincerity is not reassuring.
At least it must be confest, that having idea of the substance of the soul, it is impossible for us to tell how it can admit of such differences, and even contrarieties of perception without any fundamental change; and consequently can never tell in what sense perceptions are actions of that substance.
The fact of such cordial communications between communities separated by so many contrarieties as well as by race and distance, familiar though it is, may suggest several profitable considerations, to which I ask your attention. I. We have here an object lesson as to the uniting power of the gospel.
There were only some little fits of peevishness, which they had caused to arise in her, through certain contrarieties out of season, caresses ill applied, and for want of knowing the proper manner of education. But the Lord provided in regard to her. During this time my mind was preserved calm and resigned to God.
These allusions to the incidents of a life full of contrarieties, and a character so strange as to be almost mysterious, sufficiently show the difficulties of the task I have undertaken. But the course I intend to pursue will relieve me from the necessity of entering, in any particular manner, upon those debatable points of his personal conduct which have been so much discussed.
Till, demanding formal proof, And seeking it in everything, I lost All feeling of conviction; and, in fine, Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, Yielded up moral questions in despair. In this mood all those great generalized conceptions which are the food of our love, our reverence, our religion, dissolve away; and Wordsworth tells us that at this time
Word Of The Day
Others Looking