Unspoken Sermons quotes

One of the saddest and not least common sights in the world is the face of a child whose mind is so brimful of worldly wisdom that the human childishness has vanished from it, as well as the divine childlikeness.

For the childlike is the divine, and the very word “marshals me the way that I was going.”

But I must delay my ascent to the final argument in order to remove a possible difficulty, which, in turning us towards one of the grandest truths, turns us away from the truth which the Lord had in view here.

Nothing is inexorable but love.

Love which will yield to prayer is imperfect and poor. Nor is it then the love that yields, but its alloy. For if at the voice of entreaty love conquers displeasure, it is love asserting itself, not love yielding its claims.

It is not love that grants a boon unwillingly; still less is it love that answers a prayer to the wrong and hurt of him who prays.

Love is one, and love is changeless.

For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more;

Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed.

And our God is a consuming fire.

If this be hard to understand, it is as the simple, absolute truth is hard to understand. It may be centuries of ages before a man comes to see a truth—ages of strife, of effort, of aspiration.

It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship. He will have purity.

It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; but that the fire will burn us until we worship thus;

yea, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest consciousness of life, the presence of God.

And the first words which follow for the setting forth of that grace whereby we may serve God acceptably are these—“Let brotherly love continue.”

To love our brother is to worship the Consuming Fire.

The symbol of “the consuming fire” would seem to have been suggested to the writer by the fire that burned on the mountain of the old law. That fire was part of the revelation of God there made to the Israelites.

At all events, if God showed them these things, God showed them what was true. It was a revelation of himself.

He will not put on a mask. He puts on a face.

He will not speak out of flaming fire if that flaming fire is alien to him, if there is nothing in him for that flaming fire to reveal. Be his children ever so brutish, he will not terrify them with a lie.

Such as they were, they did well to be afraid. They were in a better condition, acknowledging if only a terror above them, flaming on that unknown mountain height, than stooping to worship the idol below them.

Fear is nobler than sensuality.

Fear is better than no God, better than a god made with hands. In that fear lay deep hidden the sense of the infinite. The worship of fear is true, although very low;

Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be, if the Bible had told us everything God meant us to believe. But herein is the Bible itself greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth.

The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God.

It is Christ “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” not the Bible, save as leading to him. And why are we told that these treasures are “hid” in him who is the Revelation of God?

… them, how shall the man, bent at best on the salvation of his own soul, understand, for instance, the meaning of that apostle who was ready to encounter banishment itself from the presence of Christ, that the beloved brethren of his nation might enter in?

To men who are not simple, simple words are the most inexplicable of riddles.

If we are bound to search after what our Lord means—and he speaks that we may understand—we are at least equally bound to refuse any interpretation which seems to us unlike him, unworthy of him.

It can take up all our wrongs, small and great, with their righteous attendance of griefs and sorrows, and carry them away from between our God and us.

Christ is God’s Forgiveness.

Before we approach a little nearer to this great sight, let us consider the human forgiveness in a more definite embodiment—as between a father and a son.

Could there be true love in any other kind of forgiveness than this? A passing-by of the offence might spring from a poor human kindness, but never from divine love. It would not be “remission.”

Forgiveness can never be indifference. Forgiveness is love towards the unlovely.

Let us look a little closer at the way a father might feel, and express his feelings.

As far as they go, these are real names, for, in some poor measure, they express individuality.

The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the being, the meaning of the person who bears it.

It is the man’s own symbol—his soul’s picture, in a word—the sign which belongs to him and to no one else. Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone.

Gone then will be all anxiety as to what his neighbour may think about him. It is enough that God thinks about him.

To be something to God⁠—is not that praise enough?

To be a thing that God cares for and would have complete for himself, because it is worth caring for—is not that life enough?

This: that what is with the treasure must fare as the treasure; that the heart which haunts the treasure-house where the moth and rust corrupt, will be exposed to the same ravages as the treasure, will itself be rusted and moth-eaten.

Many a man, many a woman, fair and flourishing to see, is going about with a rusty moth-eaten heart within that form of strength or beauty.

“But this is only a figure.”

His effort to reproduce the impression made upon his mind will, as well as the impression itself, be liable to numberless altering, modifying, even, in a measure, discomposing influences. But it does not, therefore, follow that the reproduction is false.

The mighty hosts of life-bearing worlds, requiring for the freedom of their courses, and the glory of their changes, such awful abysses of space, dwindle in the human eye to seeds of light sown upon a blue plain.

How faint in the ears of man is the voice of their sphere-born thunder of adoration! Yet are they lovely indeed, uttering speech and teaching knowledge.

Happily for such, the assurance to which they would give the name of faith generally fails them in time.

Faith is that which, knowing the Lord’s will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stands and waits, content in ignorance as in knowledge, because God wills;

neither pressing into the hidden future, nor careless of the knowledge which opens the path of action.

… the due confession and amends to our fellow, and then, forgetting our paltry self with its well-earned disgrace, lift up our eyes to the glory which alone will quicken the true man in us, and kill the peddling creature we so wrongly call our self.

The true self is that which can look Jesus in the face, and say My Lord.

When the inward sun is shining, and the wind of thought, blowing where it lists amid the flowers and leaves of fancy and imagination, rouses glad forms and feelings, it is easy to look upwards, and say “My God.”

The truth is this: He wants to make us in his own image, choosing the good, refusing the evil. How should he effect this if he were always moving us from within, as he does at divine intervals, towards the beauty of holiness?

God gives us room to be; does not oppress us with his will; “stands away from us,” that we may act from ourselves, that we may exercise the pure will for good.

Do not, therefore, imagine me to mean that we can do anything of ourselves without God.

Let us then arise in God-born strength every time that we feel the darkness closing, or become aware that it has closed around us, and say, “I am of the Light and not of the Darkness.”

Troubled soul, thou art not bound to feel, but thou art bound to arise.

God loves thee whether thou feelest or not. Thou canst not love when thou wilt, but thou art bound to fight the hatred in thee to the last. Try not to feel good when thou art not good, but cry to Him who is good.

bethink thee of something that thou oughtest to do, and go and do it, if it be but the sweeping of a room, or the preparing of a meal, or a visit to a friend.

Heed not thy feelings: Do thy work.

As God lives by his own will, and we live in him, so has he given to us power to will in ourselves.

Then the cry meant, “It is finished”; the cry meant, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

Every highest human act is just a giving back to God of that which he first gave to us.

“Thou God hast given me: here again is thy gift. I send my spirit home.” Every act of worship is a holding up to God of what God hath made us. “Here, Lord, look what I have got:

I am certain that it is impossible to keep the law towards one’s neighbour except one loves him. The law itself is infinite, reaching to such delicacies of action, that the man who tries most will be the man most aware of defeat.

We are not made for law, but for love.

Love is law, because it is infinitely more than law. It is of an altogether higher region than law—is, in fact, the creator of law. Had it not been for love, not one of the shall-nots of the law would have been uttered.

Now, here lies the mistake at last. While the thinker supposes a duality in himself which does not exist, he falsely judges the individuality a separation. On the contrary, it is the sole possibility and very bond of love.

Otherness is the essential ground of affection.

But in spiritual things, such a unity is presupposed in the very contemplation of them by the spirit of man, that wherever anything does not exist that ought to be there, the space it ought to occupy, even if but a blank, assumes the appearance …

The negative looks a positive. Where a man does not love, the not-loving must seem rational.

For no one loves because he sees why, but because he loves.

No human reason can be given for the highest necessity of divinely created existence. For reasons are always from above downwards. A man must just feel this necessity, and then questioning is over. It justifies itself.

All true action clears the springs of right feeling, and lets their waters rise and flow. A man must not choose his neighbour; he must take the neighbour that God sends him. In him, whoever he be, lies, hidden or revealed, a beautiful brother.

The neighbour is just the man who is next to you at the moment, the man with whom any business has brought you in contact.

Thus will love spread and spread in wider and stronger pulses till the whole human race will be to the man sacredly lovely. Drink-debased, vice-defeatured, pride-puffed, wealth-bollen, vanity-smeared, they will yet be brothers, yet be sisters, yet be God-born neighbours.

whereas, if he would forget himself, tenfold would be his life in God and his neighbours. The region of man’s life is a spiritual region. God, his friends, his neighbours, his brothers all, is the wide world in which alone his spirit can find room.

Himself is his dungeon.

If he feels it not now, he will yet feel it one day—feel it as a living soul would feel being prisoned in a dead body, wrapped in sevenfold cerements, and buried in a stone-ribbed vault within the last ripple of the sound of the …

It is the very presence of this fading humanity that makes it possible for us to hate. If it were an animal only, and not a man or a woman that did us hurt, we should not hate: we should only kill.

We hate the man just because we are prevented from loving him.

We push over the verge of the creation—we damn—just because we cannot embrace. For to embrace is the necessity of our deepest being. That foiled, we hate.

Mere justice is an impossibility, a fiction of analysis. It does not exist between man and man, save relatively to human law. Justice to be justice must be much more than justice.

Love is the law of our condition, without which we can no more render justice than a man can keep a straight line walking in the dark.

The eye is not single, and the body is not full of light. No man who is even indifferent to his brother can recognize the claims which his humanity has upon him. Nay, the very indifference itself is an injustice.

“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father which is in heaven is perfect.” “Love your enemies, and ye shall be the children of the highest.”

It is the divine glory to forgive.

Yet a time will come when the Unchangeable will cease to forgive; when it will no more belong to his perfection to love his enemies;

by the gravity of his riches the world held him, and would not let him rise. He counted his weight his strength, and it was his weakness. Moneyless in God’s upper air he would have had power indeed.

Money is the power of this world⁠—power for defeat and failure to him who holds it⁠—a weakness to be overcome ere a man can be strong

; yet many decent people fancy it a power of the world to come! It is indeed a little power, as food and drink, as bodily strength, as the winds and the waves are powers;

But the Master had repudiated money that he might do the will of his Father; and the disciple must be as his master. Had he done as the Master told him, he would soon have come to understand.

Obedience is the opener of eyes.

There is this danger to every good youth in keeping the commandments, that he will probably think of himself more highly than he ought to think.

In this way is the loss of the things he thought he had, a motioning, hardly towards, yet in favour of deliverance. It may seem to the man the first of his slavery when it is in truth the beginning of his freedom.

Never soul was set free without being made to feel its slavery; nothing but itself can enslave a soul, nothing without itself free it.

When the drunkard, free of his body, but retaining his desire unable to indulge it, has time at length to think, in the lack of the means of destroying thought, surely there dawns for him then at last a fearful hope!—not until, by the power …

That forethought only is right which has to determine duty, and pass into action. To the foundation of yesterday’s work well done, the work of the morrow will be sure to fit.

Work done is of more consequence for the future than the foresight of an archangel.

With the disciples as with the rich youth, it was Things that prevented the Lord from being understood. Because of possession the young man had not a suspicion of the grandeur of the call with which Jesus honoured him.

when they carry themselves so that he must withhold his hand, lest he harm them. To take no care that they acknowledge whence their help comes, would be to leave them worshippers of idols, trusters in that which is not.

Distrust is atheism, and the barrier to all growth.

Lord, we do not understand thee, because we do not trust thy Father—wholehearted to us, as never yet was mother to her firstborn!

I know as well as you that you are not likely to get rich that way; but neither will you block up the gate of the kingdom of heaven against yourself.”

Ambition in every shape has to do with Things, with outward advantages for the satisfaction of self-worship

; it is that form of pride, foul shadow of Satan, which usurps the place of aspiration. The sole ambition that is of God is the ambition to rise above oneself; all other is of the devil.

Ambition in every shape has to do with Things, with outward advantages for the satisfaction of self-worship; it is that form of pride, foul shadow of Satan, which usurps the place of aspiration.

The sole ambition that is of God is the ambition to rise above oneself; all other is of the devil.

Yet is it nursed and cherished in many a soul that thinks itself devout, filling it with petty cares and disappointments, that swarm like bats in its air, and shut out the glory of God.

but not then, not so, will he enter. The door must be opened by the willing hand, ere the foot of Love will cross the threshold. He watches to see the door move from within.

Every tempest is but an assault in the siege of love.

The terror of God is but the other side of his love; it is love outside the house, that would be inside—love that knows the house is no house, only a place, until it enter—no home, but a tent, until the Eternal dwell there.

The door must be opened by the willing hand, ere the foot of Love will cross the threshold. He watches to see the door move from within. Every tempest is but an assault in the siege of love.

The terror of God is but the other side of his love; it is love outside the house, that would be inside

—love that knows the house is no house, only a place, until it enter—no home, but a tent, until the Eternal dwell there. Things must be cast out to make room for their souls—the eternal truths which in things find shape and show.

Oh, the multitude of so-called religious questions which the Lord would answer with, “strive to enter in at the strait gate”! Many eat and drink and talk and teach in his presence; few do the things he says to them!

Obedience is the one key of life.

I would meet difficulties, not answer objections; I would remove stumbling-blocks from the path of him who would pray; I would help him to pray.

That God should hang in the thought-atmosphere like a windmill, waiting till men enough should combine and send out prayer in sufficient force to turn his outspread arms, is an idea too absurd.

God waits to be gracious not to be tempted.

A man capable of proposing such a test, could have in his mind no worthy representative idea of a God, and might well disbelieve in any: it is better to disbelieve than believe in a God unworthy.

that it is the part of love and knowledge to watch over the wayward, ignorant child; then the trouble of seemingly unanswered prayers begins to abate, and a lovely hope and comfort takes its place in the childlike soul.

To hear is not necessarily to grant⁠—God forbid! but to hear is necessarily to attend to⁠—sometimes as necessarily to refuse.

“Concerning this thing,” says St. Paul, “I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he hath said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee; power is made perfect in weakness.”

he would make him strong; the power of Christ should descend and remain upon him; he would make him stronger than his suffering, make him a sharer in the energy of God.

Verily, if we have God, we can do without the answer to any prayer.

“But if God is so good as you represent him, and if he knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask him for anything?”

For the real good of every gift it is essential, first, that the giver be in the gift—as God always is, for he is love—and next, that the receiver know and receive the giver in the gift.

Every gift of God is but a harbinger of his greatest and only sufficing gift⁠—that of himself.

No gift unrecognized as coming from God is at its own best; therefore many things that God would gladly give us, things even that we need because we are, must wait until we ask for them, that we may know whence they come:

but the making of any request brings us near to him, into communion with our Life. Does it not also help us to think of him in all our affairs, and learn in everything to give thanks?

Anything large enough for a wish to light upon, is large enough to hang a prayer upon

: the thought of him to whom that prayer goes will purify and correct the desire. To say, “Father, I should like this or that,” would be enough at once, if the wish were bad, to make us know it and turn from it.

Law is but mode of life-action. Is it of his perfection that he should have no scope, no freedom? Is he but the prisoned steam in the engine, pushing, escaping, stopped—his way ordered by valve and piston? or is he an indwelling, willing, ordering power?

Law is the slave of Life.

Is not a man’s soul, as it dwells in his body, a dim-shadowing type of God in and throughout his universe?

When the pilgrim of the truth comes on his journey to the region of the parable, he finds its interpretation.

It is not a fruit or a jewel to be stored, but a well springing by the wayside.

Let us try to understand what the Lord himself said about his parables. It will be better to take the reading of St.

The greatest obscuration of the words of the Lord, as of all true teachers, comes from those who give themselves to interpret rather than do them.

Theologians have done more to hide the gospel of Christ than any of its adversaries.

It was not for our understandings, but our will, that Christ came. He who does that which he sees, shall understand; he who is set upon understanding rather than doing, shall go on stumbling and mistaking and speaking foolishness.

but there is no such escape. A way to avoid any demand of righteousness would be an infinitely worse way than the road to the everlasting fire, for its end would be eternal death. No, there is no escape.

There is no heaven with a little of hell in it⁠—no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets.

Out Satan must go, every hair and feather! Neither shalt thou think to be delivered from the necessity of being good by being made good.

No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it—no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets.

Out Satan must go, every hair and feather!

Neither shalt thou think to be delivered from the necessity of being good by being made good.

Next after doubt comes reasoning on the doubt: “The only one must be God! I know no one but myself: I must myself be God—none else!”

Poor helpless dumb devil!⁠—his own glorious lord god!

Yea, he will imagine himself that same resistless force which, without his will, without his knowledge, is the law by which the sun burns, and the stars keep their courses, the strength that drives all the engines of the world.

The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is, to cry Father! from a full heart.

I would help whom I may to call thus upon the Father.

but the moment he does, then it is everything to the child’s heart that he should be indeed the child of him after whom his soul is thirsting. However bad I may be, I am the child of God, and therein lies my blame.

Ah, I would not lose my blame! in my blame lies my hope.

It is the pledge of what I am, and what I am not; the pledge of what I am meant to be, what I shall one day be, the child of God in spirit and in truth.”

Because we are his children, we must become his sons and daughters. Nothing will satisfy him, or do for us, but that we be one with our father! What else could serve! How else should life ever be a good!

Because we are the sons of God, we must become the sons of God.

There may be among my readers—alas for such!—to whom the word “Father” brings no cheer, no dawn, in whose heart it rouses no tremble of even a vanished emotion. It is hardly likely to be their fault.

To be a child is not necessarily to be a son or daughter.

The childship is the lower condition of the upward process towards the sonship

, the soil out of which the true sonship shall grow, the former without which the latter were impossible. God can no more than an earthly parent be content to have only children:

then shall the creation, subjected to vanity for their sakes, find its freedom in their freedom, its gladness in their sonship. The animals will glory to serve them, will joy to come to them for help.

Let the heartless scoff, the unjust despise! the heart that cries “Abba, Father,” cries to the God of the sparrow and the oxen

; nor can hope go too far in hoping what that God will do for the creation that now groaneth and travaileth in pain because our higher birth is delayed. Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?

How different is the weariness of the strong man after labour unduly prolonged, from the weariness of the sick man who in the morning cries out, “Would God it were evening!” and in the evening, “Would God it were morning!”

Low-sunk life imagines itself weary of life, but it is death, not life, it is weary of.

Never a cry went out after the opposite of life from any soul that knew what life is. Why does the poor, worn, outworn suicide seek death? Is it not in reality to escape from death?—from the death of homelessness and hunger and cold;

What Jesus did, was what the Father is always doing; the suffering he endured was that of the Father from the foundation of the world, reaching its climax in the person of his Son.

God provides the sacrifice; the sacrifice is himself.

He is always, and has ever been, sacrificing himself to and for his creatures. It lies in the very essence of his creation of them.

… of the God-life in the individual soul—a suffering still renewed, a labour thwarted ever by that soul itself, compelling him to take, still at the cost of suffering, the not absolutely best, only the best possible means left him by the resistance of his creature.

Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because he would give the best, and man will not take it.

What Jesus did, was what the Father is always doing; the suffering he endured was that of the Father from the foundation of the world, reaching its climax in the person of his Son. God provides the sacrifice; the sacrifice is himself.

“In the midst of life we are in death,” said one; it is more true that in the midst of death we are in life.

Life is the only reality; what men call death is but a shadow

—a word for that which cannot be—a negation, owing the very idea of itself to that which it would deny. But for life there could be no death. If God were not, there would not even be nothing. Not even nothingness preceded life.

Life is the only reality; what men call death is but a shadow—a word for that which cannot be—a negation, owing the very idea of itself to that which it would deny. But for life there could be no death.

If God were not, there would not even be nothing.

Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence.

We who are, have nothing to do with death; our relations are alone with life. The thing that can mourn can mourn only from lack; it cannot mourn because of being, but because of not enough being.

We are vessels of life, not yet full of the wine of life; where the wine does not reach, there the clay cracks, and aches, and is distressed.

Who would therefore pour out the wine that is there, instead of filling to the brim with more wine! All the being must partake of essential being; life must be assisted, upheld, comforted, every part, with life.

There would be, even in that one love, in the simple purity of a single affection such as we were created to generate, and intended to cherish, towards all, an expansion of life inexpressible, unutterable.

For we are made for love, not for self. Our neighbour is our refuge; self is our demon-foe.

Every man is the image of God to every man, and in proportion as we love him, we shall know the sacred fact. The precious thing to human soul is, and one day shall be known to be, every human soul.

For we are made for love, not for self. Our neighbour is our refuge; self is our demon-foe.

Every man is the image of God to every man, and in proportion as we love him, we shall know the sacred fact.

The precious thing to human soul is, and one day shall be known to be, every human soul.

… he is drawing more nigh to the goal of his nature, the central secret joy of sonship to a God who loves righteousness and hates iniquity, does nothing he would not permit in his creature, demands nothing of his creature he would not do himself.

The fire of God, which is his essential being, his love, his creative power, is a fire unlike its earthly symbol in this, that it is only at a distance it burns

—that the farther from him, it burns the worse, and that when we turn and begin to approach him, the burning begins to change to comfort, which comfort will grow to such bliss that the heart at length cries out with a gladness no other …

What father being evil would it not win to see the child with whom he was vexed running to his embrace? how much more will not the Father of our spirits, who seeks nothing but his children themselves, receive him with open arms!

Self, accepted as the law of self, is the one demon-enemy of life; God is the only Saviour from it, and from all that is not God, for God is life, and all that is not God is death.

Life is the destruction of death, of all that kills, of all that is of death’s kind.

I incline to the former, and think that John saw him like the man he had known so well, and that it was the too much glory, dimming his vision, that made him unsure, not any perceived unlikeness mingling with the likeness.

Nothing blinds so much as light, and their very glory might well render him unable to distinguish plainly the familiar features of The Son of Man.

But the appearance of The Son of Man was not intended to breed terror in the son of man to whom he came. Why then was John afraid? why did the servant of the Lord fall at his feet as one dead?

it has a sting in it far worse than all the other misery with which he is tormented; but it is not fixed in the hopelessness of hell by an accepted explanation more frightful than itself.

Let the world-sphinx put as many riddles as she will, she can devour no man while he waits an answer from the world-redeemer.

Job refused the explanation of his friends because he knew it false; to have accepted such as would by many in the present day be given him, would have been to be devoured at once of the monster.

The child has, and must have, a claim on the father, a claim which it is the joy of the father’s heart to acknowledge.

A created need is a created claim.

God is the origin of both need and supply, the father of our necessities, the abundant giver of the good things. Right gloriously he meets the claims of his child!

he had to die in the endeavour to make us listen and receive. “When ye shall have done all the things that are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which it was our duty to do.”

Duty is a thing prepaid: it can never have desert.

There is no claim on God that springs from us: all is from him.

It is through their show, not through their analysis, that we enter into their deepest truths. What they say to the childlike soul is the truest thing to be gathered of them.

To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it⁠—just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology, all that is said about his person, or babbled about his work.

The body of man does not exist for the sake of its hidden secrets; its hidden secrets exist for the sake of its outside—for the face and the form in which dwells revelation: its outside is the deepest of it.

What are its oxygen, its hydrogen, its nitrogen, its carbonic acid, its ozone, and all the possible rest, to the blowing of the wind on our faces?

What is the analysis of water to the babble of a running stream?

What is any knowledge of things to the heart, beside its child-play with the Eternal!

I say “yielding”; for a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith.

Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the honest.

They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood; and theirs in general is the inhospitable reception of angels that do not come in their own likeness. Doubt must precede every deeper assurance;

They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood; and theirs in general is the inhospitable reception of angels that do not come in their own likeness.

Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed.

In all Job’s begging and longing to see God, then, may well be supposed to mingle the mighty desire to be assured of God’s being. To acknowledge is not to be sure of God.

From everything that is against the teaching and thinking of Jesus, from the world in the heart of the best man in it, specially from the world in his own heart, the disciple must turn to follow him.

The first thing in all progress is to leave something behind; to follow him is to leave one’s self behind.

“If any man would come after me, let him deny himself.”

they are not true, and they cannot really be inside any good man. They are sadly against him; for he cannot love to dwell upon any of those supposed characteristics of his God; he acts and lives nevertheless in a measure like the true God.

What a man believes, is the thing he does.

This man would shrink with loathing from actions such as he thinks God justified in doing; like God, he loves and helps and saves. Will the living God let such a man’s opinions damn him?

they lay themselves down to sleep with nothing but the skirt of his robe in their hand—a robe too, I say, that never was his, only by them is supposed his—when they might sleep in peace with the living Lord in their hearts.

Instead of so knowing Christ that they have him in them saving them, they lie wasting themselves in soul-sickening self-examination as to whether they are believers

, whether they are really trusting in the atonement, whether they are truly sorry for their sins—the way to madness of the brain, and despair of the heart.

That were too dreadful. I believe you do not understand him. No man can do yet what he tells him aright—but are you trying?

Obedience is not perfection, but trying.

You count him a hard master, and will not stir. Do you suppose he ever gave a commandment knowing it was of no use for it could not be done? He tells us a thing knowing that we must do it, or be lost;

It is one thing to believe that God can do nothing wrong, quite another to call whatever presumption may attribute to him right.

The whole secret of progress is the doing of the thing we know.

There is no other way of progress in the spiritual life; no other way of progress in the understanding of that life: only as we do, can we know.

What do I hear you say?—“How then shall the world go on?”

The Lord’s world will go on, and that without you; the devil’s world will go on, and that with you.

The objection is but another and overwhelming proof of your unbelief. Either you do not believe the word the Lord spake—that, if we seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, all things needful will be added to us;

Then only is life itself; then only is it right, is it one; then only is it as designed and necessitated by the eternal life-outgiving Life.

Whereto then we have attained let us walk by that same!

Neither could he be righteous—that is, fair to his creatures—but that his love created them. His perfection is his love. All his divine rights rest upon his love. Ah, he is not the great monarch!

The simplest peasant loving his cow, is more divine than any monarch whose monarchy is his glory.

If God would not punish sin, or if he did it for anything but love, he would not be the father of Jesus Christ, the God who works as Jesus wrought.

… from the same birth-home as himself, namely, the heart of his God and our God, his father and our father, but who, without our elder brother to do it first, would never have chosen that self-abjuration which is life, never have become alive like him.

To will, not from self, but with the Eternal, is to live.

This choice of his own being, in the full knowledge of what he did; this active willing to be the Son of the Father, perfect in obedience—is that in Jesus which responds and corresponds to the self-existence of God.

But I would not forget that there are many in whom foolish forms cover a live heart, warm toward everything human and divine; for the worst-fitting and ugliest robe may hide the loveliest form.

Every covering is not a clothing.

The grass clothes the fields; the glory surpassing Solomon’s clothes the grass; but the traditions of the worthiest elders will not clothe any soul—how much less the traditions of the unworthy! Its true clothing must grow out of the live soul itself.

There is nothing for us to conceive in its stead—therefore indeed it must be so. In its discovered laws, light seems to me to be such because God is such.

Its so-called laws are the waving of his garments, waving so because he is thinking and loving and walking inside them.

We are here in a region far above that commonly claimed for science, open only to the heart of the child and the childlike man and woman—a region in which the poet is among his own things, and to which he has often to go …

science will never find the face of God; while those who would reach his heart, those who, like Dante, are returning thither where they are, will find also the spring-head of his science.

Analysis is well, as death is well; analysis is death, not life.

It discovers a little of the way God walks to his ends, but in so doing it forgets and leaves the end itself behind.

Find for us what in the constitution of the two gases makes them fit and capable to be thus honoured in forming the lovely thing, and you will give us a revelation about more than water, namely about the God who made oxygen and hydrogen.

There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier.

The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse.

Then you will know that you are at the heart of the universe, at the heart of every secret—at the heart of the Father. Not till then will you be free, then free indeed!”

Christ died to save us, not from suffering, but from ourselves; not from injustice, far less from justice, but from being unjust.

He died that we might live—but live as he lives, by dying as he died who died to himself that he might live unto God.

suffering will not. For evil in the abstract, nothing can be done. It is eternally evil. But I may be saved from it by learning to loathe it, to hate it, to shrink from it with an eternal avoidance.

The only vengeance worth having on sin is to make the sinner himself its executioner.

Sin and punishment are in no antagonism to each other in man, any more than pardon and punishment are in God; they can perfectly coexist.

Physical suffering may be a factor in rousing this mental pain; but “I would I had never been born!” must be the cry of Judas, not because of the hellfire around him, but because he loathes the man that betrayed his friend, the world’s friend.

When a man loathes himself, he has begun to be saved.

Punishment tends to this result. Not for its own sake, not as a makeup for sin, not for divine revenge—horrible word, not for any satisfaction to justice, can punishment exist. Punishment is for the sake of amendment and atonement.

neither, if he could, would they be of any value to him: he would be nothing the better, he would be the worse for having them.

Our business is not to think correctly, but to live truly; then first will there be a possibility of our thinking correctly.

One chief cause of the amount of unbelief in the world is, that those who have seen something of the glory of Christ, set themselves to theorize concerning him rather than to obey him.

They do their unintentional worst to stop all growth, all life. From such and their false teaching I would gladly help to deliver the truehearted.

Let the dead bury their dead, but I would do what I may to keep them from burying the living.

If there be no satisfaction to justice in the mere punishment of the wrongdoer, what shall we say of the notion of satisfying justice by causing one to suffer who is not the wrongdoer?

Thus the leaven spreads. The truth is there. It is Christ the glory of God. But the ideas that poor slavish souls breed concerning this glory the moment the darkness begins to disperse, is quite another thing.

Truth is indeed too good for men to believe; they must dilute it before they can take it; they must dilute it before they dare give it.

They must make it less true before they can believe it enough to get any good of it.

How can you, not caring to be true, judge concerning him whose life was to do for very love the things you confess your duty, yet do them not? Obey the truth, I say, and let theory wait.

Theory may spring from life, but never life from theory.

I will not then tell you what I think, but I will tell any man who cares to hear it what I believe. I will do it now.

He has received it in no systematic form; it is what a life, the life, what a man, the man, has taught him.

The Word is the Lord; the Lord is the gospel.

The good news is no fagot of sticks of a man’s gathering on the Sabbath.

You shall not die; you shall live to thank me that I would not hear your prayer. You know what you ask, but not what you refuse.”

There are good things God must delay giving until his child has a pocket to hold them⁠—till he gets his child to make that pocket.

He must first make him fit to receive and to have. There is no part of our nature that shall not be satisfied—and that not by lessening it, but by enlarging it to embrace an ever-enlarging enough.

“But there is another side to the matter: God is light indeed, but there is darkness; darkness is death, and men are in it.”

Yes; darkness is death, but not death to him that comes out of it.

It may sound paradoxical, but no man is condemned for anything he has done; he is condemned for continuing to do wrong.

but, whether he punish directly or indirectly, he is always working to deliver. I think sometimes his anger is followed, yea, accompanied by an astounding gift, fresh from his heart of grace. He knows what to do, for he is love.

He is love when he gives, and love when he withholds; love when he heals, and love when he slays.

Lord, if thus thou lookest upon men in thine anger, what must a full gaze be from thine eyes of love!

they say it in the bitterness of their tears, in their eyes of despair, in their black garments, in their instant retreat from the light of day to burrow in the bosom of darkness? “What, would you have us not weep?”

Weep freely, friends; but let your tears be those of expectant Christians, not hopeless pagans.

Let us look at the story.

To those who are awake, I cry, “For the sake of your father and the firstborn among many brethren to whom we belong, for the sake of those he has given us to love the most dearly, let patience have her perfect work.

Statue under the chisel of the sculptor, stand steady to the blows of his mallet.

Clay on the wheel, let the fingers of the divine potter model you at their will. Obey the Father’s lightest word; hear the Brother who knows you, and died for you; beat down your sin, and trample it to death.”