Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Piety

Cicero doubts whether it were possible for a community to exist that had not a prevailing mixture of piety in its constitution.

He is a pious man who, contemplating all things with a serene and quiet soul, conceiveth aright of God, and worshippeth Him in his mind: not induced thereto by hope or reward, but for His supreme nature and excellent majesty.

God hath taken care to anticipate and prevent every man to give piety the prepossession before other competitors should be able to pretend to him; and so to engage him in holiness first, and then in bliss.

Piety is the necessary Christian virtue proportioned adequately to the omniscience and spirituality of that infinite Deity.

If so were it possible that all other ornaments of mind might be had in their full perfection, nevertheless the mind that should possess them, divorced from piety could be but a spectacle of commiseration.

Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religious hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pain and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper and deeper, and where he finds only new gradations of anguish and precipices of horror.

If God has interwoven such a pleasure with our ordinary calling, how much superior must that be which arises from the survey of a pious life? Surely as much as Christianity is nobler than a trade.

Piety, as it is thought a way to the favour of God, and fortune, as it looks like the effect either of that, or at least of prudence and courage, beget authority.

As the practice of all piety and virtue is agreeable to our reason, so it is likewise the interest, both of private persons and of public societies.

Piety and virtue are not only delightful for the present, but they leave peace and contentment behind them.