A Quote by Herman Melville
The terrors of truth and dart of death To faith alike are vain.
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In literature and in art, alike, this gloomy fashion of regarding Death has been characteristic of Christianity. Death has been painted as a skeleton grasping a scythe, a grinning skull, a threatening figure with terrible face and uplifted dart, a bony scarecrow shaking an hourglass - all that could alarm and repel has been gathered round this rightly-named King of Terrors.
True religion extends alike to the intellect and the heart. Intellect is in vain if it lead not to emotion, and emotion is vain if not enlightened by intellect; and both are vain if not guided by truth and leading to duty.
There is an essential difference between the decease of the godly and the death of the ungodly. Death comes to the ungodly man as a penal infliction, but to the righteous as a summons to his Father's palace. To the sinner it is an execution, to the saint an undressing from his sins and infirmities. Death to the wicked is the King of terrors. Death to the saint is the end of terrors, the commencement of glory.
Death has no terrors for a sincere servant of Christ who is laboring to bring souls to a knowledge of the truth.
It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislator to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them.
My godfather was a man named Justin Dart. Some of you may remember Justin Dart. My younger son's name is Justin, named after Justin Dart. I was executor of his estate, and he was my godfather. I first really got time to spend with Ronald Reagan with Justin Dart personally, one-on-one.
I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
When I throw a dart, even when I'm looking I know if I've missed or hit as soon as I release the dart.
My faith in the expertise of physicists like Richard Feynman, for instance, permits me to endorse—and, if it comes to it, bet heavily on the truth of—a proposition that I don't understand. So far, my faith is not unlike religious faith, but I am not in the slightest bit motivated to go to my death rather than recant the formulas of physics. Watch: E doesn't equal mc2, it doesn't, it doesn't! I was lying, so there!
Courage, ne'er by sorrow broken! Aid where tears of virtue flow; Faith to keep each promise spoken! Truth alike to friend and foe!
Death ready stands to interpose his dart.
We lean on Faith; and some less wise have cried, "Behold the butterfly, the see that's cast!" Vain hopes that fall like flowers before the blast! What man can look on Death unterrified?
There is faith in every serious doubt, namely, the faith in the truth as such, even if the only truth we can express is our lack of truth.
Why, all delights are vain, but that most vain Which, with pain purchased, doth inherit pain: As, painfully to pore upon a book, To seek the light of truth, which truth the while Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look.
Faith is indeed intellectual; it involves an apprehension of certain things as facts; and vain is the modern effort to divorce faith from knowledge. But although faith is intellectual, it is not only intellectual. You cannot have faith without having knowledge; but you will not have faith if you have only knowledge.
Biography is one of the new terrors of death.
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