A Christian Home

Priestess, wife, and mother, there she minister[ed] daily in holy works of household peace, and by faith and prayer and love redeem[ed] from grossness and earthliness the common toils and wants of life;... and whether she washed or ironed, or moulded biscuit or conserved plums, her gentle beauty seemed to turn to poetry all the prose of life.

—Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister's Wooing, ps 326, 15.

Men and Women

Spite of all the treatises that have lately appeared, to demonstrate that there are no particular inherent diversities between men and women, we hold to the opinion that one thorough season of house-cleaning is sufficient to probe the existence of awful and mysterious difference between the sexes, and of subtile and reserved forces in the female line, before which the lords of creation can only veil their faces with a discreet reverence.

—Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister's Wooing ©1859, p 284.

The Great Poet of Life

Every impulse of beauty, of heroism, and every craving for purer love, fairer perfection, nobler type and style of being that that which closes like a prison-house around us, in the dim, daily walk of life, is God's breath, God's impulse, God's reminder to the soul that there is something higher, sweeter, purer, yet to be attained.

—Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister's Wooing, p 72.

The Minister's Wooing

He contemplated the entrance on married life somewhat in this wise:—That at a time and place suiting, he should look out unto himself a woman of a pleasant countenance and of good repute, a zealous, earnest Christian, and well skilled in the items of household management, whom, accosting as a stranger and pilgrim to a better life, he should loyally and lovingly entreat, as Isaac did Rebekah, to come under the shadow of his tent and be a helpmeet unto him in what yet remained of this mortal journey.

—Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister's Wooing, p 52.

The Heart-Fountain

So we go,—so little knowing what we touch and what touches us as we talk! We drop out a common piece of news,... and lo, on our right hand or our left, some heart has sunk under the news silently,—gone down in the great ocean of Fate, without even a bubble rising to tell its drowning pang. An this—God help us!—is what we call living!

—Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister's Wooing, p 41.

In Less Sophisticated Days

In those times, people held to the singular opinion that the night was made to sleep in; they inferred it from a general confidence they had in the wisdom of Mother Nature, supposing that she did not put out her lights and draw her bed-curtains and hush all the noise in her great world-house without strongly intending that her children should go to sleep; and the consequence was, that very soon after sunset the whole community very generally set their faces bedward, and the tolling of the nine-o'clock evening-bell had an awful solemnity in it, announcing the end of all respectable proceedings in life for that day.

—Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister's Wooing, p 11.

Jim Elliot

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.

—Jim Elliot, The Journals of Jim Elliot p. 17.