And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship.
Interpretation
The loss of worship symbolizes a deeper decline in a nation's moral and spiritual values.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote emphasizes the significance of worship and spirituality within a nation. He suggests that losing the capacity or the inclination to worship can lead to profound moral and ethical decay, ultimately endangering the very fabric of society. This loss, he contends, can be more disastrous than any physical calamity, as it signifies a disconnect from fundamental values and principles that unify and uplift people.
In practice
In a speech about community values, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of shared beliefs.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Poverty is bitter, but it has no harder pang than that it makes men ridiculous.
He who lives as children live - who does not struggle for his bread and does not believe that his actions possess any ultimate significance - remains childlike.
Never forget your real identity. You are a luminous conscious stardust being forged in the crucible of cosmic fire.
I would suggest the taxation of all property equally, whether church or corporation, exempting only the last resting place of the dead and possibly, with proper restrictions, church edifices.
The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us.
I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at commensurate speed.
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