by Mike Roberts, Church Historian.
During the 1960s the orders of service for our church included thoughtful words to ponder while waiting for the service to begin. Below are a few of those thoughts for you to ponder as we continue our trip through the fall season.
Let us strive more to comfort others than to be comforted,
To understand others than to be understood,
To love others more than to be loved.
—St. Francis of Assisi—
Every personality bears the imprint of the universal.
—Lewis Mumford—
I am the people— the mob— the crowd— the mass.
Do you know that all of the work of the world is done through me?
I am the workman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
I am the audience which witnesses history.
—Carl Sandburg—
When the ocean is in tumult, every shore will feel the agitation.
When the sea is calm and tides come in, all vessels rise to greet the dawn and leave the land in peace for distant shores.
— William Ellery Channing—
Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.
— Albert Schweitzer—
For a thought to change the world, it must first change the life of the man who carries it.
— Albert Camus—
What could we build if we worked together?
— U Thant —
The love of liberty is the love of others.
The love of power is the love of ourselves.
— William Hazlitt —
The question is no longer whether we can believe in God but whether and in what sense we can believe in man.
— Max Otto —
Ideas are, in truth, like forces.
Infinite, too, is the power of personality.
A union of the two makes history.
— Henry James —
Two things fill the mind with ever increasing awe and admiration.
The starlit heavens above and the moral law within.
— Immanuel Kant —
Out of the fertile earth we come, children of the dust. May we know ourselves akin to all earth’s creatures and for our having lived, may the earth-home be fairer for the generations which shall come.
— Slaten —
I deeply believe in the capacity of democracy to surmount any trials which may lie ahead, provided only that we practice it in our daily lives.
— David Lilienthal —
Image: Our congregation’s home in Walnut Hills in the early and mid 1960s.