It is the "terror of the Lord" that causes us to "persuade" others, but it is the love of Christ that constraineth us to live to Him.
         ... John Owen

         The will directs the tongue or the hand to act, and the evil word is spoken, or the evil deed done. Every time we sin, it is the whole of us that sins, and not just a part. The body is only the instrument of the mind and the will. All that God made, including the body with all its desires and instincts, is good in itself. But it has to be kept under control and used in the right way.
         ... Stephen Neill, The Christian Character

         It is Truth which we must look for in Holy Writ, not cunning of words. All Scripture ought to be read in the spirit in which it was written. We must rather seek for what is profitable in Scripture, than for what ministereth to subtlety in discourse.
         ... Thomas à Kempis

         In my intellect, I may divide [faith and works], just as in the candle I know there is both light and heat; yet put out the candle, and both are gone.
         ... John Selden

         When an occasion of practicing some virtue offered, he addressed himself to God, saying, "Lord, I cannot do this unless Thou enablest me"; and... then he received strength more than sufficient. When he had failed in his duty, he simply confessed his fault, saying to God, "I shall never do otherwise if Thou leavest me to myself; it is Thou who must hinder my falling, and mend what is amiss." After this, he gave himself no further uneasiness about it.
         ... Joseph de Beaufort, The Character of Brother Lawrence
 
 

         It is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord... In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God... Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation.
         ... Ingmar Bergman
 
 

         Men say, "How are we to act, what are we to teach our children, now that we are no longer Christians?" You see, gentlemen, how I would answer that question. You are deceived in thinking that the morality of your father was based on Christianity. On the contrary, Christianity presupposed it. That morality stands exactly where it did; its basis has not been withdrawn, for, in a sense, it never had a basis. The ultimate ethical injunctions have always been premises, never conclusions. Kant was perfectly right on that point at least, the imperative is categorical. Unless the ethical is assumed from the outset, no argument will bring you to it.
         ... C. S. Lewis, "On Ethics"
 
 

         If, when God sends judgments upon others, we do not take warning and example by them; if instead of reflecting upon ourselves and questioning our ways we fall to censuring others; if we will pervert the meaning of God's providences and will not understand the design and intention of them; then we leave God no other way to awaken us to a consideration of our evil ways but by pouring down his wrath upon our heads, so that he may convince us that we are sinners by the same argument from whence we have concluded others to be so.
         ... John Tillotson
 
 

         Not only the young Christian but also the adult Christian will complain that the Scripture reading is often too long for him, and that much therein he does not understand. To this it must be said that, for the mature Christian, every Scripture reading will be "too long", even the shortest one, [for] the Scripture is a whole, and every word, every sentence, possesses such multiple relationships with the whole that it is impossible always to keep the whole in view when listening to details. It becomes apparent, therefore, that the whole of Scripture, and hence every passage in it as well, far surpasses our understanding. It is good for us to be daily reminded of this fact.
         ... Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together
         ... Also see comments on this book in Bookworms
 
 

         Christianity does not consist in any partial amendment of our lives, any particular moral virtues, but in an entire change of our natural temper, a life wholly devoted to God.
         ... William Law
 
 

         Is it not plain that all spiritual apathy comes not from over-trust but from unbelief, either doubting that sin is present death, or else that holiness is life and that Jesus has a gift to bestow, not in heaven, but promptly, which is better to gain than all the world? Therefore salvation is linked with faith, which earns nothing but elicits all, like the touch that evokes electricity but which no man supposes to have made it.
         ... G. A. Chadwick, The Gospel of St. Mark
 
 

         Since such uncultivated and rude simplicity inspires greater reverence for itself than any eloquence, what ought one to conclude except that the force of Sacred Scripture is manifestly too powerful to need the art of words?
         ... John Calvin
 
 

         In the whole range of history there is no more striking contrast than that of the Apostolic churches with the heathenism around them. They had shortcomings enough, it is true, and divisions and scandals not a few, for even apostolic times were no golden age of purity and primitive simplicity. Yet we can see that their fullness of life, and hope, and promise for the future, were a new sort of power in the world. Within their own limits they had solved almost by the way the social problem which baffled Rome, and baffles Europe still. They had lifted woman to her rightful place, restored the dignity of labour, abolished beggary, and drawn the sting of slavery. The secret of the revolution is that the selfishness of race and class were forgotten in the Supper of the Lord, and a new basis for society found in love of the visible image of God in men for whom Christ died.
         ... Henry M. Gwatkin, Early Church History to A.D. 312

Good Friday in my heart! Fear and affright!
My thoughts are the disciples when they fled,
My words the words that priest and soldier said,
My deed the spear to desecrate the dead.
And day, Thy death therein, is changed to night.

Then Easter in my heart sends up the sun.
My thoughts are Mary, when she turned to see,
My words are Peter, answering, 'Lov'st thou me?'
My deeds are all Thine own drawn close to Thee.
And night and day, since thou dost rise, are one.
         ... Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

All night had shouts of men and cry
         Of woeful women filled His way;
Until that noon of sombre sky
         On Friday, clamour and display
Smote Him; no solitude had He.
No silence, since Gethsemane.

Public was death; but power, but might,
         But life again, but victory,
Were hushed within the dead of night,
         The shuttered dark, the secrecy.
And all alone, alone, alone
He rose again behind the stone.
         ... Alice Meynell

Morning breaks upon the tomb,
Jesus scatters all its gloom.
Day of triumph through the skies--
See the glorious Saviour rise.

Christians! Dry your flowing tears,
Chase those unbelieving fears;
Look on his deserted grave,
Doubt no more his power to save.

Ye who are of death afraid,
Triumph in the scattered shade:
Drive your anxious cares away,
See the place where Jesus lay.
         ... William Bengo Collyer

         It was a real body; there can be no doubt about that. Hundreds of people could not have been so mistaken, especially when Jesus offered clear evidence of it. But it was not an earthbound body. It was something that bore a developmental relationship to an earthly human body, but it was not identical with it. There was clearly a continuity of life between the body of Jesus and the body of the resurrected Jesus, but in the process of resurrection it had undergone a very fundamental change. That, at least, seems obvious. So much for the list of dissimilarities; the body of Jesus after the resurrection had a different appearance and also a different "form". It was "like" the previous body, it had some sort of developmental relationship to it, but it was obviously not "identical" with it. Now we must consider the similarities. Strangely, they all came down to one factor, but that factor is so important that it outweighs all the dissimilarities. It is simply this: Jesus before and after the resurrection was undeniably the same person. No matter what extraordinary changes had taken place in his bodily form, all who knew him well had no doubt at all who he was. They "knew" it was the Lord.
         ... David Winter
 
 

         As Christ drew near to death, He Himself trembled. It was an experience of all His creation, but He had never felt it. To His humanity, His assumed flesh, it seemed terrible -- Gethsemane bears witness how terrible it seemed; but He passed into it for love of us.
         ... Phillips Brooks
 
 

         So long as we are full of self, we are shocked at the faults of others. Let us think often of our own sin, and we shall be lenient to the sins of others.
         ... François Fénélon
 
 

         The criterion for our intercessory prayer is not our earnestness, nor our faithfulness, nor even our faith in God, but simply God Himself. He has taken the initiative from the beginning, and has built our prayers into the structure of the universe. He then asks us to present these requests to Him that He may show His gracious hand.
         ... Charles H. Troutman
 
 

         O Lord our God, grant us grace to desire Thee with our whole heart; that, so desiring, we may seek, and seeking find Thee; and so finding Thee may love Thee; and loving Thee, may hate those sins from which Thou hast redeemed us.
         ... St. Anselm
 
 

         Many worthy people, and many good books, with no doubt the best intentions, ... have represented a life of sin as a life of pleasure; they have pictured virtue as self-sacrifice, austerity as religion. Even in everyday life we meet with worthy people who seem to think that whatever is pleasant must be wrong, that the true spirit of religion is crabbed, sour, and gloomy; that the bright, sunny, radiant nature which surrounds us is an evil and not a blessing, -- a temptation devised by the Spirit of Evil and not one of the greatest delights showered on us in such profusion by the Author of all Good.
         ... Sir John Lubbock, The Use of Life
 
 

         The Christian's life is lived in the open, not in a pious cubby-hole. As Christ gives Himself to feed us, so we have to incarnate something of His all-loving, all-sacrificing soul. If we do not, then we have not really received Him. That is the plain truth. It has been said that there are many ways and degrees of receiving the Blessed Sacrament. It really depends on how wide we open our hearts. A spiritually selfish communion is not a communion at all.
         ... Evelyn Underhill, The Light of Christ
 
 

         Utopias of historical progress cannot seduce those who believe in Christ. Utopias are the straws to which those cling who have no real hope; utopias are as unattractive as they are incredible, for those who know what real hope is. Utopias are not a consequence of true hope but a poor substitute for it and therefore a hindrance and not a help. The hope that is in Jesus Christ is different from all utopias of universal progress. It is based on the revelation of the crucified one. It is, therefore, not an uncertain speculation about the future but a certainty based upon what God has already revealed. One cannot believe in Jesus Christ without knowing for certain that God's victory over all powers of destruction, including death, is the end towards which the time process moves as its own end.
         ... Emil Brunner, The Scandal of Christianity

         To love another as oneself is only the halfway house to Heaven, though it seems as far as it was prudent to bid man go. The "greater love than this" of which our Lord speaks, though He does not command it, is to give oneself for one's friends. And when one does this, or is ready to do this, prayer even for "us" seems too selfish -- and it is unnecessary, for we then possess all that God Himself can give us. The easy renunciation of self for the Beloved becomes the very breath of life.
         ... Coventry Patmore
 
 

         To take the fact of evil seriously is to take the fact of morality seriously.... I am unable to see how the fact of the moral consciousness, and, in particular, the fact of the opposition between "is" and "ought", between desire and duty, can be explained in terms of purely natural causation... [They] can be explained only on the assumption that, in addition to the natural, there is also a non-natural order of the universe which is immanent in and on occasion intrudes actively into the natural.
         ... C. E. M. Joad, The Recovery of Belief
 
 

"I have not sought Thee, I have not found Thee,
         I have not thirsted for Thee:
And now cold billows of death surround me,
Buffeting billows of death astound me,
         Wilt Thou look upon, wilt Thou see
         Thy perishing me?"

"Yea, I have sought thee, yea, I have found thee,
         Yea, I have thirsted for thee,
Yea, long ago with love's bands I bound thee:
Now the Everlasting Arms surround thee,
         Through death's darkness I look and see
         And clasp thee to Me."
         ... Christina Rossetti

         We can reach the point where it becomes possible for us to recognize and understand Original Sin, that dark counter-centre of evil in our nature -- that is to say, though it is not our nature, it is of it -- that something within us which rejoices when disaster befalls the very cause we are trying to serve, or misfortune overtakes even those we love. Life in God is not an escape from this, but a way to gain full insight concerning it. It is not our depravity which forces a fictitious religious explanation upon us, but the experience of religious reality which forces the "Night Side" out into the light. It is when we stand in the righteous all-seeing light of love that we can dare to look at, admit, and consciously suffer under this something in us which wills disaster, misfortune, defeat to everything outside the sphere of our narrowest self interest.
         ... Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings
 
 

         No indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual nature so much as respectable selfishness.
         ... George Macdonald
 
 

         The truth is neither mine nor his nor another's; but belongs to us all whom Thou callest to partake of it, warning us terribly, not to account it private to ourselves, lest we be deprived of it.
         ... St. Augustine

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