The Apocrypha... ought to be bound up with all your Bibles; it contain — John Tyndall

"Science, which is the logic of nature, demands proportion between the house and its foundation. Theology sometimes builds weighty structures on a doubtful base."

"Christ found the religions of the world oppressed almost to suffocation by the load of formulas piled upon them by the priesthood. He removed the load, and rendered respiration free. He cared little for forms and ceremonies, which had ceased to be the raiment of mans spiritual life. To that life he looked, and it he sought to restore."

"[O]f the future form of religion little can be predicted. Its main concern may possibly be to purify, elevate, and brighten the life that now is, instead of treating it as the more or less dismal vestibule of a life that is to come."

"The Sabbath being regarded as a shadow or type of that heavenly repose which the righteous will enjoy when this world has passed away, so these six days of creation are so many periods or millenniums for which the world and the toils and labours of our present state are destined to endure. The Mosaic account was thus reduced to a poetic myth... But if this symbolic interpretation, which is now generally accepted, be the true one, what becomes of the Sabbath day? It is absolutely without ecclesiastical meaning. The man who was executed for gathering sticks on that day must therefore be regarded as the victim of a rude legal rendering of a religious epic."

"Knowledge once gained casts a faint light beyond its own immediate boundaries."

"Some years ago I found myself in discussion with a friend who entertained the notion that the general tendency of things in this world is towards equilibrium, the result of which would be peace and blessedness to the human race. My notion, was that equilibrium meant... death. No motive power is to be got from heat, save during its fall from a higher to a lower temperature, as no power is to be got from water save during its descent from a higher to a lower level. Thus also life consists, not in equilibrium, but in the passage towards equilibrium. In man it is the leap from the potential through the actual to repose."