David Josiah Brewer Quotations

Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire - but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.

The better life rests less on the prohibitions of the Ten Commandments and more on the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Golden Rule.

A nation may be born in a day, but the great truths which make for the glory and uplift of the race only through long ages permeate and control humanity. We must have the divine patience and understand the divine mathematics of a thousand years as one day.

Who does not delight in oratory? How we gather to hear even an ordinary speaker! How often is a jury swayed and controlled by the appeals of counsel!

Christianity is entitled to the tribute of respect. I do not of course mean that all individuals, nominally Christian, deserve trust, confidence, or even respect, for the contrary is too often the case. Too often, men hold religion as they do property - in their wives' names.

The phonograph and kinetoscope may some day seize and perpetuate all save the magnetic touch, but that weird, illusive, indefinable yet wonderfully real power by which the orator subdues may never be caught by science or preserved for the cruel dissecting knife of the critic.

The time has passed in the history of the world when anything is too sacred to be touched, when anything is beyond the reach of the inquiring and scientific spear.

It is Mormonism, Mohammedanism and heathenism and not Christianity which have proclaimed polygamy and debased woman from the sacred place of wife to the lower level of concubine. It is not Christianity which has sustained the social evil.

He who is honest in his dealings simply because of the social prestige and position it secures will never develop his higher nature, but will always live along the lower lines.

I believe it is conceded that, notwithstanding the fabled blue laws of New England, a man may, without impropriety, kiss his wife on Sunday and possibly, if he have a chance, some other sweet-faced woman.

It is a mistake to suppose that the Supreme Court is either honoured or helped by being spoken of as beyond criticism. On the contrary, the life and character of its justices should be the objects of constant watchfulness by all, and its judgments subject to the freest criticism.

Neighbor is no longer confined to the vocabulary of the individual. It is a national word. Modern inventions have annihilated distance. Commercial relations have broken down barriers of race and religion, and the family of nations is a recognized fact.

Religion of any form is a sacred matter. It involves the relation of the individual to some Being believed to be infinitely supreme. It involves not merely character and life here, but destiny hereafter, and as such is not to be spoken of lightly or flippantly.

No nation is better than its sacred book. In that book are expressed its highest ideals of life, and no nation rises above those ideals. No nation has a sacred book to be compared with ours. This American nation from its first settlement at Jamestown to the present hour is based upon and permeated by the principles of the Bible. The more this Bible enters into our national life the grander and purer and better will that life become.

Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise, and in this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian.

I could show how largely our laws and customs are based upon the laws of Moses and the teachings of Christ; how constantly the Bible is appealed to as the guide of life and the authority in questions of morals... Add a volume of unofficial declaration to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.