Edwin Hubbell Chapin (1814–80) was an American preacher and the editor of The Christian Leader. A Universalist minister, author, and social reformer, he was also a poet, responsible for the poem “Burial at Sea,” which is the origin of a famous folk song, “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.”
Born in Union Village, New York, Chapin attended a seminary at Bennington, Vermont, and became a pastor in 1838. After ten years of serving congregations in Virginia and Massachusetts, he settled in New York City as pastor of the Church of the Divine Paternity, serving there for thirty years. The church was renamed the Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York, and Chapin’s oratory attracted crowds of almost 2,000 each Sunday.
Chapin’s works included the collections of sermons The Crown of Thorns: A Token for the Sorrowing (1847,) Duties of Young Women (1849,) Living Words (1860,) and God’s Requirements and Other Sermons (1881.)
Chapin was the author of the poem “Ocean Burial” or “Burial at Sea,” which was set to music by composer George N. Allen. This popular song became a sailor’s song and developed into another song, “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.”
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Edwin Hubbell Chapin
At the bottom of a good deal of the bravery that appears in the world there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Cowardice, Brave
Those old ages are like the landscape that shows best in the purple distance, all verdant and smooth, and bathed in mellow light.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
The individual and the race are always moving; and as we drift into new latitudes new lights open in the heavens ttore immediately over us.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Progress
Neutral men are the devil’s allies.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
When private virtue is hazarded on the perilous cast of expediency, the pillars of the republic, however apparent their stability, are infected with decay at the very centre.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Skepticism has never founded empires, established principles, or changed the world’s heart.—The great doers in history have always been men of faith.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Skepticism, Doubt
There is less misery in being cheated than in that kind of wisdom which perceives, or thinks it perceives, that all mankind are cheats.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Deceit
Events are only the shells of ideas; and often it is the fluent thought of ages that is crystallized in a moment by the stroke of a pen or the point of a bayonet.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Ideas, Life
The worst effect of sin is within, and is manifest not in poverty, and pain, and bodily defacement, but in the discrowned faculties, the unworthy love, the low ideal, the brutalized and enslaved spirit.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Sin
There is no mockery like the mockery of that spirit which looks around in the world and believes that all is emptiness.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it forgoes revenge, and dares forgive an injury.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Forgiveness
Morality is the vestibule of religion.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Morality
Goodness consists not in the outward things we do, but in the inward things we are. To be good is the great thing.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
A true man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
The deepest life of nature is silent and obscure; so often the elements that move and mould society are the results of the sister’s counsel and the mother’s prayer.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Silence, Influence
It is a most fearful fact to think of, that in every heart there is some secret spring that would be weak at the touch of temptation, and that is liable to be assailed. Fearful, and yet salutary to think of, for the thought may serve to keep our moral nature braced. It warns us that we can never stand at ease, or lie down in the field of life, without sentinels of watchfulness and campfires of prayer.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Temptation
There never was a man all intellect; but just in proportion as men become so they become like lofty mountains, all ice and snow the higher they rise above the warm heart of the earth.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Through every rift of discovery some seeming anomaly drops out of the darkness, and falls, as a golden link, into the great chain of order.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Discovery
There is no happiness in life, and there is no misery, like that growing out of the dispositions which consecrate or desecrate a home.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Home
Profaneness is a brutal vice.—He who indulges in it is no gentleman.—I care not what his stamp may be in society, or what clothes he wears, or what culture he boasts.—Despite all his refinement, the light and habitual taking of God’s name in vain, betrays a coarse and brutal will.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Swearing, Profanity, Vulgarity
The angels may have wider spheres of action and nobler forms of duty than ourselves, but truth and right to them and to us are one and the same thing.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Angels
Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Fashion
The weak sinews become strong by their conflict with difficulties.—Hope is bom in the long night of watching and tears.—Faith visits us in defeat and disappointment, amid the consciousness of earthly frailty and the crumbling tombstones of mortality.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Difficulty, Difficulties
No language can express the power and beauty and heroism and majesty of a mother’s love. It shrinks not where man cowers, and grows stronger where man faints, and over the wastes of worldly fortune sends the radiance of its quenchless fidelity like a star in heaven.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Mother, Pregnancy
The downright fanatic is nearer to the heart of things than the cool and slippery disputant.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Fanaticism
Whatever touches the nerves of motive, whatever shifts man’s moral position, is mightier than steam, or caloric, or lightning.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Motivational, Motivation
Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Helping, Action, Eternity
Not armies, not nations, have advanced the race; but here and there, in the course of ages, an individual has stood up and cast his shadow over the world.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Individuality
In the history of man it has been very generally the case, that when evils have grown insufferable they have touched the point of cure.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Evils
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth—the true poet is very near the oracle.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Topics: Poetry, Poets
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