Show Your Best Stuff

It is always infelicitous when men fall into the habit of speaking of religion as the mother of trials, and oftheir Christian experience from the side of its restrictions and limitations ... When people want to make things attractive in farming, they give exhibitions of their products. The women bring their very best butter, molded into tempting golden lumps; and the men bring the noblest beets and vegetables of every kind; and from the orchards they bring the rarest fruits, and when you go into the room where all these things are displayed, they seem to you attractive and beautiful.

It seems to me that this is the way a Christian church ought to represent the Christian life. You ought to pile up your apples and pears and peaches and flowers and vegetables, to show what is the
positive fruit of religion. But many people in Christian life do as farmers would do who should go to a show, and carry -- one, pigweed; another, thistles; another, dock; and another, old hard lumps of clay; and should arrange these worthless things along the sides of the room, and mourn over them. What sort of husbandry would that be? Christians are too apt to represent the dark side of religion in their conversation and meetings.

-- Henry Ward Beecher