Advice to young Samuel Gompers that might apply in many other areas: "Learn from socialism, but don't join it.

Christians should never have a political party. It is a huge mistake to become married to an ideology, because the greatest enemy of the gospel is ideology. Ideology is a man-made format of how the world ought to work, and Christians instead believed in the revealing truth Scripture.

Of England's patrician class, the author writes: "It was easy to be agreeable when everything was done to keep them in comfort and ease.

Asked what would be his idea of Heaven, one statesman in 1897 said it would be to "receive a flow of telegrams alternating news of a British victory by sea and a British victory by land.

The English patrician bloomed in his natural climate.

Isolation might be more hazardous than splendor.