No candle which God lights was ever meant to burn alone.- J. C. Ryle

Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.- Yousuf Karsh, 1908 - 2002

Without Christ I was like a fish out of water. With Christ I am in the ocean of love.- Sadhu Singh

Without realizing what was happening, most of us gradually
came to take for granted the premises underlying this
philosophy of optimism. We proceeded to live these
propositions, though we would not have stated them as blandly
as I set them forth here:
Man is inherently good.
Individual man can carve out his own salvation with the
help of education and society through progressively better
government.
Reality and values worth searching for lie in the material
world that science is steadily teaching us to analyze,
catalogue, and measure. While we would not deny the existence
of inner values, we relegate them to second place.
The purpose of life is happiness, [which] we define in
terms of enjoyable activity, friends, and the accumulation of
material objects.
The pain and evil of life--such as ignorance, poverty,
selfishness, hatred, greed, lust for power--are caused by
factors in the external world; therefore, the cure lies in the
reforming of human institutions and the bettering of
environmental conditions.
As science and technology remove poverty and lift from us
the burden of physical existence, we shall automatically become
finer persons, seeing for ourselves the value of living the
Golden Rule.
In time, the rest of the world will appreciate the
demonstration that the American way of life is best. They will
then seek for themselves the good life of freedom and
prosperity. This will be the greatest impetus toward an end of
global conflict.
The way to get along with people is to beware of religious
dictums and dogma. The ideal is to be a nice person and to live
by the Creed of Tolerance. Thus we offend few people. We live
and let live. This is the American Way.-Catherine Marshall (1914-1983), Beyond Our Selves, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961, p. 5-6