Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance quotes

… tradesman who makes a good coat enjoys the satisfaction of having fitted and pleased his customer, and a bricklayer, if he be diligent, is rewarded by knowing that his master understands his value, but I never knew what it was to receive a single response.

I wrote for an abstraction; and spoke to empty space.

I cannot help claiming some pity and even respect for the class to which I belonged. I have heard them called all kinds of hard names, hacks, drudges, and something even more contemptible, but the injustice done to them is monstrous.

It is possible, and even probable, that the public fury and the subsequent amity were equally absurd. Most of us have no real loves and no real hatreds.

Blessed is love, less blessed is hatred, but thrice accursed is that indifference which is neither one nor the other, the muddy mess which men call friendship.

M’Kay—for that was his name—lived, as I have said, in Goodge Street, where he had unfurnished apartments.

I was excited while imagining the opportunity offered me of delivering some message to three or four thousand persons in such a building, but in a minute or two I discovered that my sermon would be very nearly as follows:

“Dear friends, I know no more than you know; we had better go home.”

I admitted to him that if he could believe in hellfire, or if he could proclaim the Second Advent, as Paul did to the Thessalonians, and get people to believe, he might change their manners, but otherwise he could do nothing but resort to a …

But Miss Leroy was not the wine-merchant, nor the ironmonger, nor Guffy, and even now I cannot trace the hidden centre of union from which sprang so much that was apparently irreconcilable.

She was a person whom nobody could have created in writing a novel, because she was so inconsistent.

As I have said before, she studied Thomas à Kempis, and her little French Bible was brown with constant use. But then she read much fiction in which there were scenes which would have made our hair stand on end.

Butts without saying anything which could be the ground of formal remonstrance.

Thus did Mrs. Butts live among us, as an Arabian bird with its peculiar habits, cries, and plumage might live in one of our barnyards with the ordinary barn-door fowls.

I was never happier when I was a boy than when I was with Mrs. Butts at the mill, which George had inherited. There was a grand freedom in her house. The front door leading into the garden was always open.

It was but a principle; whether it suited this particular case was the one important point on which Miss Arbour was no authority. What was it which prompted this inexplicable emotion? A thousand things rushed through my head without reason or order.

I begin to believe that a first love never dies.

A boy falls in love at eighteen or nineteen. The attachment comes to nothing. It is broken off for a multitude of reasons, and he sees its absurdity.

A million chances are encountered every day, and any one of the million accidents which might happen would cripple him or kill him, and put into the workhouse those who depend upon him. Yet he treads his path undisturbed.

Life to all of us is a narrow plank placed across a gulf, which yawns on either side, and if we were perpetually looking down into it we should fall.

So at last, the possibility of disaster ceased to affright me.

I clapped a muzzle on my mouth. Had I followed my own natural bent, I should have become expressive about what I had to endure, but I found that expression reacts on him who expresses and intensifies what is expressed.

If we break out into rhetoric over a toothache, the pangs are not the easier, but the worse to be borne.

I naturally contracted a habit of looking forward from the present moment to one beyond. The whole week seemed to exist for the Sunday. On Monday morning I began counting the hours till Sunday should arrive.

Oh, how absurd is man! If we were to reckon up all the moments which we really enjoy for their own sake, how few should we find them to be!

The greatest part, far the greatest part, of our lives is spent in dreaming over the morrow, and when it comes, it, too, is consumed in the anticipation of a brighter morrow, and so the cheat is prolonged, even to the grave.

This tendency, unconquerable though it may appear to be, can to a great extent at any rate, be overcome by strenuous discipline.

and thankfulness, that it had pleased God to present to me so much of His own divinest grace.

Fool that I was, not to be aware that messages from Him are not to be read through the envelope in which they are enclosed.

I never should have believed, if it had not been for Marie, that any grown-up man could so love a child. Such love, I should have said, was only possible between man and woman, or, perhaps, between man and man.

… that He whom he worshipped holds both cheat and victim in His hand, smites the eloquent with paralytic stammerings, turns the old man into a melancholy childish driveller, and causes nations to swerve aside over precipices, under the guidance of leaders whom He has blinded.

Job is the type of those great thinkers who cannot compromise; who cannot say but yet; who faithfully follow their intellect to its very last results, and admit all its conclusions.

They are better to a man so constituted than living in a fool’s paradise, however paradisaical it may be. “For,” translating the twelfth verse of the thirteenth chapter into intelligibility by the help of the German Version, “your sayings are sayings of ashes;

or, what is most frequent, each day brings its own special hindrance, in the shape of ill-health, failure of power, or poverty, and a fatal net is woven over the limbs preventing all activity.

The youth with his dreams wakes up some morning, and finds himself fifty years old with not one solitary achievement, with nothing properly learned, with nothing properly done, with an existence consumed in mean, miserable, squalid cares, and his goal henceforth is the grave in which to hide himself ashamed.

Bildad’s second response travels over the old ground. “The light of the wicked shall be put out, and the spark of his fire shall not shine,” etc. etc., and Job reiterates that all this is nothing but clatter.

Into the much-disputed question of the meaning of the famous verses at the end of the 19th chapter, which have been so generally supposed to refer to the resurrection, I cannot enter.

I do not know what they mean, and it is a pity that commentators, where there is no certain light, cannot say there is none, but feel themselves compelled to give an interpretation.

I will only go so far as to admit that if there is any allusion to future life here, much of what goes before and comes after is obscured.

So strong is the superstition of the friends that Eliphaz now advances to a creation of crimes which Job must have committed.

It is more easy to believe him to be a sinner than that their creed can be shaken.

“Thou hast taken,” says Eliphaz, “a pledge from thy brother for nought, and stripped the naked of their clothing. Thou hast not given water to the weary to drink, and thou hast withholden bread from the hungry.

In discernment of the real breadth and depth of social duty, nothing has gone beyond the book of Job.

Much of it ought to be engraved upon brass and set upon pillars throughout the land, as a perpetual reminder of the truth as between man and man.

In one of the shires of this country stands, or used to stand, a tablet with a mark on it twenty or thirty feet above the level of the river which runs beneath, and on the tablet it is recorded, incredible almost to all present …

We have not to ascertain what we might imagine or wish Him to say. We have to find out what He did say. Most scrupulously are we to avoid foisting upon Him any idea of our own.

It is much easier to impose a meaning upon the Bible, written in an age so unlike our own, than to extract the meaning from it.

God reminds us of His wisdom, of the mystery of things, and that man is not the measure of His creation. The world is immense, constructed on no plan or theory which the intellect of man can grasp. It is transcendent everywhere.

In this way the lesson which the whirlwind taught us has been expanded and intensified.

We return to it anew after all the creeds, and we say that they are but the hearing of Him, and that this is seeing Him.

It is this which caused Job to put his hand on his mouth—the truth that even the dry clod and the desert grass are dear to Him though no man is near them. Why should they not be?

Why should I say that dew falling on a thorn in a desert is wasted, but falling on my flower shows proper economy?

Furthermore, if resources are inexhaustible, there can be no waste.

I have often reproached myself that principles have done so little for me.

It is not that I have not got any. I have been for years familiar with all the wisest and noblest principles which are to be found in philosophical and religious books from the time of Moses downwards.

An act is concrete, and that means that it is something in which oppositions find their solution and lie in repose. This, it will be said, leaves us just where we were and gives us no assistance. It is a just criticism.

Man is man because he possesses the proud prerogative of actualising the abstract. He is not its fool.

In each deed he does he has to be aware of two poles, and say, “Between them, doing justice to both, I fix this deed so.” Instead of two poles there may be a dozen or more, not exactly poles, but divergent or opposite pulls.

Let us not be cast down at our difficulties. Let us rejoice rather at the exalted, the divine task that is imposed on us.

Man is the very top of the creation, the express image of the Creator, because at every moment of his life he resolves abstracts into realities.

The curse of every truth is that a counterfeit of it always waits on it, and is its greatest enemy.

Let us rejoice rather at the exalted, the divine task that is imposed on us. Man is the very top of the creation, the express image of the Creator, because at every moment of his life he resolves abstracts into realities.

The curse of every truth is that a counterfeit of it always waits on it, and is its greatest enemy.

What is this which I have said but the mere commonplace that we must never go too far, and that compromise is the rule of life. But between my doctrine and this commonplace there is a great difference.

The truth, on the other hand, is that every principle is efficacious up to the uttermost, and that faith in it is never to be abandoned.

The compromise comes of imbecility or impotence, and is essentially contrary to the concrete reconciliation of abstracts.

It is difficult to separate morals from wisdom, and in fact no clear line of demarcation is possible; but perhaps we may say that in morals a single clear principle is more distinctly supreme than in wisdom. Morality is the region of the abstract.