“An honest man's the noblest work of God”

Stanza 19
The Cotter's Saturday Night (1786)

The Heretic (1968)

(402).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Music
Song lyrics, Buddha and the Chocolate Box (1974)

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: Blasphemy is what an old mistake says of a newly discovered truth.
Blasphemy is what a withered last year's leaf says to a this year's bud.
Blasphemy is the bulwark of religious prejudice.
Blasphemy is the breastplate of the heartless.
And let me say now, that the crime of blasphemy, as set out in this statute, is impossible. No man can blaspheme a book. No man can commit blasphemy by telling his honest thought. No man can blaspheme a God, or a Holy Ghost, or a Son of God. The Infinite cannot be blasphemed.

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: I believe in intellectual hospitality. I love men that have a little horizon to their minds -- a little sky, a little scope. I hate anything that is narrow and pinched and withered and mean and crawling, and that is willing to live on dust. I believe in creating such an atmosphere that things will burst into blossom. I believe in good will, good health, good fellowship, good feeling -- and if there is any God on the earth, or in heaven, let us hope that he will be generous and grand. Do you not see what the effect will be? I am not cursing you because you are a Methodist, and not damning you because you are a Catholic, or because you are an Infidel -- a good man is more than all of these. The grandest of all things is to be in the highest and noblest sense a man.

Address to the United Nations (1963)
Context: The Charter of the United Nations expresses the noblest aspirations of man: abjugation of force in the settlement of disputes between states; the assurance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion; the safeguarding of international peace and security.
But these, too, as were the phrases of the Covenant, are only words; their value depends wholly on our will to observe and honour them and give them content and meaning. The preservation of peace and the guaranteeing of man's basic freedoms and rights require courage and eternal vigilance: courage to speak and act — and if necessary, to suffer and die — for truth and justice; eternal vigilance, that the least transgression of international morality shall not go undetected and unremedied.
These lessons must be learned anew by each succeeding generation, and that generation is fortunate indeed which learns from other than its own bitter experience. This Organization and each of its members bear a crushing and awesome responsibility: to absorb the wisdom of history and to apply it to the problems of the present, in order that future generations may be born, and live, and die, in peace.

Bk. II, ch. 5
The words Carlyle put in italics are a quotation from Book 1 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.
1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)
Context: Hadst thou not Greek enough to understand thus much: The end of man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest.