Friday: In Dag Hammarskjold’s Markings there are two entries apropos of the above. In the spring of the year he died he wrote, "I don’t know who – or what - put the question. I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remembering answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone - or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self surrender, had a goal." The other is this: "God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason."
Cutting from Bolton Weekly 17th June 1965

The things that haven’t been done before
Are the things worthwhile today.
Are you one of the flock that follows or
Are you one of the timid souls that quail
At the jeers of the doubting crew,
Or dare you, whether you win or fail,
Strike out for the path that’s new?

He (Dr Brocklesby) mentioned a respectable gentleman who became extremely penurious near the close of his life. Johnson said,
"There must have been a degree of madness about him." "Not at all, Sir, (said Dr. B) his judgement was entire. Unluckily, however, he mentioned that although he had a fortune of £27 000, he denied himself many comforts from an apprehension he could not afford them."

What a happiness, what a joy it is to be quite sure that there is a God. Not anything built up by mere human reasoning, no clever or subtle hypothesis, nothing particularly French or German or English but something as infinitely more real than the air around us, and the pollen of flowers, and the flight of the birds, and the trials and troubles and the needs of our little lives stimulated and enriched by the lives of creatures so different from ourselves, touching us continually all round; and the fundamental assurance is not simply one of variety or even of richness. It is an assurance accompanying and crowning all such sense of variety, of a reality, of the reality, one and harmonious, strong and self sufficing, of God.
: the last paragraph dictated for his unfinished book,

Which only shows, yet once more, how right the Buddha was in classing unawareness and stupidity among the deadly sins.

I wish to make people aware so they do not squander and dissipate their lives! The aristocrats assume that there is always a mass of men lost. But they hide the fact, they live withdrawn and behave as though these many, many men did not exist. That is what is Godless in the superiority of the aristocrats; in order to have things their own way they do not even make people aware.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

One becomes amazingly receptive after two years dearth of the pure elements of earth. What it means to have around the hills and meadows, fields and forests after prison grills and walls: the scent of flowers instead of smoke and steam from damp clothing; bird chorus instead of the grind of machinery day and night – that cannot be put into words.
From pamphlet In Prison - yet Free by Eva Herman, a Quaker imprisoned 1943-45 by Nazis for befriending Jews.

Beauty is a token fallen from heaven to earth in order to remind us of the ideal world.

If I give you a rose, you cannot doubt God anymore.

I love all beauteous things
I seek and adore them
God hath no better praise
And man in his hasty days
Is honoured for them

For he who would proceed aright in this manner should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one such form only – out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another and that beauty in every form is one and the same.

It is in the light of our beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality that we formulate our conception of right and wrong; and it is in the light of our conceptions of right and wrong that we frame our conduct, not only in the relations of private live, but also in the sphere of politics and economics.

Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which comes miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience but they do not stop to think that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled ‘piotos’ into us – that is, trust and loyalty etc.

I have found words for my inmost thoughts, songs for my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my shame and feebleness.

..Professor T.H. Huxley had such men in mind in his great panegyric on the Bible, when, after bidding us consider that, "This book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history", he concludes, "And finally that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village, to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilisations in the world, and of a great past stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of what other book could children be so humanised and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession, fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the intervals between two eternities, and earns the blessings or the curses of all time according to its efforts to do good and hate evil, even as they are also earning their payment for their work.

I will spread out before thee the pleasant fields of Holy Scripture, that with an enlarged heart thou mayest begin to run the way of my commandments.

The Word did it all, I left it to the Word.

The Bible is the greatest sermon in the world.

See entry in Inspiration on Tolstoy

"In the beginning of the year 1653, I was at the plough in the East part of Old England near the place where my outward being was and as I walked after the plough I was filled with the love and presence of the living God, which did ravish my heart when I felt it, for it did increase and abound in me like a living stream, so did the life and love of God run through me like precious ointment giving a pleasant smell which made me to stand still. And as I stood a little still, with my heart and mind stayed upon the Lord, the word of the Lord came to me in a still small voice, which I did hear perfectly saying to me in the secret of my heart and conscience, "I have ordained thee a prophet unto the nations" and at the hearing of the word of the Lord I was put to a stand, seeing that I was but a child for such a weighty matter." But since disobedience was out of the question, Marmaduke Stevenson put aside his plough

For the radical and permanent transformation of personality only one effective method has been discovered – that of the mystics. It is a difficult method demanding from those who undertake it a great deal more patience, resolution, self-abnegation and awareness than most people are prepared to give.

The only conceivable way of bringing about a reconstruction of our world is first of all to become new men under the old circumstances.

S. Robinson wrote to Bolivar. "Only understand that to make a new republic one must first make a new people."

I think it is a very poor kind of holiness that does not make us care for others.

It is for your love alone that men will pardon you for the bread you give to them.

Constant cheerfulness is the sure sign of a wise mind.

Christ is the stooping down of God, the arm of God on which we can lean; the heart of God of which we can feel the sympathy; the eye of God of which we can bear the glance; the voice of God which is music, melody and peace.

Christ is the stooping down of God, the arm of God on which we can lean; the heart of God of which we can feel the sympathy; the eye of God of which we can bear the glance; the voice of God which is music, melody and peace.

Christ is the stooping down of God, the arm of God on which we can lean; the heart of God of which we can feel the sympathy; the eye of God of which we can bear the glance; the voice of God which is music, melody and peace.

... For from the hour of my birth, to my death on the cross; I was not without suffering or grief. I suffered great want of things temporal. I often heard many complaints. . . etc.
Thomas A Kempis: Imitation of Christ Book 4 (13) page 230

Not the historical Jesus but the spirit which goes forth from him and in the spirits of men strives for new influence and rule, is that which overcomes the world.

Schweitzer also asserts: To me, however, Jesus remains what he was. Not for a single minute have I had to struggle for my conviction that in Him is the supreme spiritual and religious authority.
Albert Schweitzer: The Quest of the Historical Jesus page 401

To one of his officers on his island prison, Napoleon said: " I am a great failure; but Jesus the carpenter of Nazareth is a world conqueror.

If Jesus Christ is a man -
And only a man - I say
That of all mankind I will cleave to him
and to Him I will cvleave alway

If Jesus Christ is a God -
And the only God - I swear
I will follow Him through heaven and hell,
The earth the sea and the air.

Christianity is eternity in the midst of time.
Harnack

Christianity is not primarily demand but fulfilment.

O perfect love, out passing sight,
O love beyond our ken,
Come down through all the world tonight
And heal the hearts of men.
Laurence Housman

The people thronged to Bethlehem
The people came
They came to laugh to talk to stare,
They came to sign the census there;
The people came
I too have come to Bethlehem,
I too have come;
I came a Saviour to adore
Of grace and love he has great store:
I, too, have come.

When God gave music to the world it was not in some theory of counterpoint and harmony; he dressed a song in feathers and sat it on a tree.
When God gave love to the world it was not in some thesis on the emotions; he implanted it in a mother’s heart.
When God gave himself to the world it was not in some new piece of theology. He wrapped a babe in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger.
‘Let us go, even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass.’

The ultimate criterion to distinguish a false or moribund church from a true and living church is the power of Jesus Christ himself. John Mackay God’s Order Page 160

‘Sire, it is in truth the lot of the Church of God, in whose name I speak, to suffer blows and not to return them. Yet I also take leave to remind you that she is an anvil which has employed many hammers.’

Addressed by Beza to the King of Navarre after the massacre of Vassey.

The Church is the fellowship of the dead to themselves and alive for Christ.

Wherever we see the word of God sincerely preached and heard, wherever we see the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there we cannot have any doubt that the Church of God has some existence, since his promise cannot fail, ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst.’
Calvin: Institution IV 1.9 L Newbiggin: The Household of God page 49

The Church is her true self only when she exists for humanity.

St. Augustine, somewhere, has a phrase about the church of his day, as, like a frost bound tree, seeming dead, but waiting for the summer. Sacred Trinity had every sign of being dead but waiting for nothing.

The Church is nothing but a section of humanity in which Christ has really taken form.

(During the 30 Years War) . . . . . The habit of committing atrocities had developed a general taste for atrocities. With cruelty, as with lust, avarice, gluttony and the love of power: l’appetit vien en mangeant. Hence the importance of preserving at any cost the unreasoned tradition of civilised conduct, the social convention of ordinary decency. Destroy these and immediately large numbers of men and women, discovering within themselves no obvious reasons why they should not behave like devils, do behave like devils and go on doing so until such time as they physically destroy themselves, or grow weary of the strain and uncertainty of diabolic life, or else, for whatever providential reason, discover deep in their own souls the hidden springs of compassion, the potential goodness, latent even in the worst of men and by the best, fully actualised in the superhuman splendour of saintliness.

Do you really have feelings any longer for anybody or anything except your self – or even that? Without the strength of a personal commitment, your experience of others is most aesthetic. etc.
Dag Hammersjkold Markings page. 58

One of the busiest of city dentists was once asked how he managed to do his work with such calm efficiency when he knew that the adjoining room was crowded with people awaiting him. His reply was that for him only one patient existed.

It is the thought that must be polished . . . Once it is perfected its expression will drop from the pen as lucid and shining as a drop of water.
Joseph Joubert: Ibid

Our government is through the synod, composed of ministers and deputies from each congregation. The synod has final authority over every phase of our corporate thought or branch of corporate work, every congregation or Board of Administration or portion of property. The synod may be regarded as a representative body suitable to the democratic character of a church which calls itself ‘unitas fratrum’.
But really, it seeks to stand for something higher still, and comes down from early days before the word ‘democratic’ enjoyed the high reputation it has today. There were days when our forefathers were greatly exercised in their minds over the question of government. The were anxiously asking themselves who should be appointed to the position of ‘Chief Elder’, to use the title then employed. Who was to be the chief authority in the church? And it flashed on their minds that no human being was fitted or could be called to that position. For that position was already filled by Christ himself – Christ was the chief elder of the church. Let every gathering and every administrative or governing function be placed under Christ’s direction. And the Synod was meant to be the body of Christians meeting to receive the direction of the true head of the Church. To use a theological term, the Synod was to be the organ of a Christocracy.
Rt. Rev. C. H. Shawe D.D. The Moravian Church and what it stands for page 15

Conscience with Isaiah is not what it is with so much religion of today, a cul de sac in which the Lord chases a man and shuts him up to himself, but it is a thoroughfare by which the Lord drives the man out upon the world and its manifold need of him.
George Adam Smith Book of Isaiah

My heart is abundantly satisfied that I cannot subscribe without sinning against God, wronging my own conscience and giving offence to the people of God. Well thou my soul, since thou art thus resolved, prepare thyself for suffering and glory that thou art counted worthy to suffer for the name of Christ.
Oliver Heywood

If thou canst not contemplate high and heavenly things; rest in the passion of Christ; and dwell gladly in his sacred wounds. For if thou fly devoutly to the wounds, and precious marks of Jesus; thou shalt feel great comfort in tribulation; thou wilt not much care for the slights of men; and wilt easily bear words of detraction.

Art thou poor yet hast thou golden slumbers?
O sweet content!

• One of the chief reasons for discontent is that people do not find the right niche in the world.

Christianity brings and preaches salvation by the conversion of the will, - Humanism by the emancipation of the mind.
Amiel’s Journal 7/4/51 P. 11

In my view, conversion does not mean adding an extra dimension – the religious – to all other dimensions of our existence, but the unsnarling of the tangled threads of our lives, so that, by an act of the will, we bring our priorities into line with these of Jesus and derive the power for living from the same sources as that from which Jesus drew his.
Hence, when someone approaches me with the light of religious fervour in his eyes and assures me joyously that he has been converted, I do not want to know what effect this experience has had upon his churchgoing or prayer life, but how it has manifested itself on the pressure points of his life – in his attitudes to sex, money, power, race, politics, etc. etc.

Courage is not the opposite of despair. Kierkegarde and Nietsche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is the absence of despair; it is rather the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

Whence St. Francis, seeing so much courtesy and goodwill in him, said, "Know most dearly beloved brother, that courtesy is one of the properties of God, who gives his sun and rain to the just and the unjust by courtesy; and courtesy is the sister of charity, by which hatred is extinguished and love is cherished".

A dirty brown penny held near enough to the eye can blot out the sun.

In answer to this, I must in all honesty set my longstanding and assured conviction that creedal subscription to ancient confessions of faith is a practice dangerous to the integrity of the individual conscience.

But when the morn came dim and sad
And chill with early showers
Her quiet eyelids closed – she had
Another morn than ours

Now death was lovely and beautiful in my sight, for I saw we shall never live indeed till we be gone to the other side.

It is not growing like a tree
In bulk doth make a man better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year
To fall at last, dry bald and sere;
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May
Although it fall and die that night –
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see
And in short measures life may perfect be.

He then made mention of his end which he believed was near; and signified that though he was sensible of many imperfections in the course of his life, yet his experience of the power of truth and of the love and goodness of God from time to time, even till now, was such that on leaving this life he had no doubt he should enter one more happy.
John Woolman: said of his father, Journal page 67 Chapter III

So shalt thou feed on death, that feed on men,
And death, once dead, there’s no more dying then
W. Shakespeare: Golden Treasury P 48

Death is a gate on the skyline.
Mary Webb

Thou madest death and lo, Thy foot is on
the skull that thou hast made.
Tennyson: In Memoriam

…As the African says to the soul of his dying friend, "Come back, this is your home".

This is the end - for me the beginning of life.
The last words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer before he was hanged in a Nazi Extermination Camp

Death is but the side of life that is turned from us.

Once, I answered yes to someone – or something. And from that hour I was certain that existence was meaningful and that therefore, my life in self-surrender has a goal.

Man’s depth would be despair but for God’s deeper depth.

Human life begins on the far side of despair.

Poverty is naught to have and nothing to desire; and all things to possess in the spirit of liberty.

Any given event in any part of the universe has as its determining conditions all previous and contemporary events in all parts of the universe. Those, however, who make it their business to investigate the causes of what goes on around them habitually ignore the overwhelming majority of contemporary and antecedent happenings. In each particular case, they insist, only a very few of the determining conditions are of practical significance.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

As I pointed out, all the obvious arguments are arguments for determinism and it is exceedingly difficult to discover any purely rational grounds for believing in freedom. Nevertheless, in spite of those arguments, most of us are convinced that we are free.

He complacently assumed that he was a man without prejudices, not realising that this assumption was blatant prejudice.

…The Hassidic story related by Martin Buber. A Rabbi who happened to be in Jerusalem heard the great trumpets blow, and there was a rumour that the Messiah had come. The Rabbi opened his window, looked around and said, "I see no change."
Karl Stern: The Pillar of Fire P.155

Distraction For though we talk lightly of doing this or that to distract the mind, it remains really as well as verbally true, that to be distracted is to be distraught. The original Latin word does not mean relaxation, it means being torn asunder as by wild horses. The original Greek word that corresponds to it is used in the text which says that Judas burst asunder in the midst.

"I have a hard enough time with my own doubts, without adding somebody else’s to them," said Brush in a low voice.
"What are you afraid of doubts for? There’s one thing worse than doubts, that’s evasions. You’re full of evasions. You don’t even want to look around. You don’t give a goddam for the truths."

The prevalence of doubt – for all belief is founded on preliminary doubt – is the supreme characteristic of man, that which makes him distinctively human and enlightened, whereas " the ignorant doubt little, the drunkard still less, the madman never."

Scepticism is very often the basis for a doctrine of revelation.

May 19th, 1780 has gone down in Connecticut history as the famous dark day. The sky was overcast at noon and by mid-afternoon had blacked over so densely, so ominously, that in that religious age, men were certain the day of judgement was at hand. The Connecticut House of Representatives was in session and as some men fell on their knees and others clamoured for an immediate adjournment, the speaker of the house got to his feet. He was a certain Colonel Davenport. He said these words. "The Day of Judgement is either approaching or it is not. If it is, I prefer to be found doing my duty. If it is not there is no cause for adjournment. I wish therefore that candles may be brought."

When the soul shares the purpose of God, not coldly but with eager desire, then there is a new fact in the spiritual world. A new way is opened whereby the Lord can enter into the hearts of men.

… As yet I knew not that evil was nothing but the privation of good, until at last a thing ceases altogether to be…
Augustine: Confessions Bk3 vii page 56

The object of a Christian should be to be like Christ – never a coolie recruiter trying to bring coolies to his master’s tea garden. Preaching your doctrine is no sacrifice at all … It breeds an illusion in you that you are doing your duty and that you are wise and better than your fellow beings. But the real preaching is in being perfect, which is through meekness and love and self-dedication.

Fellowship with God answers a thousand questions of casuistry.
Bonar: Heavenly Springs page 87

Faith is a bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.
Rabinindrath Tagore

Faith is an act of consecration in which the will, the intellect and the affections all have their place. It is the resolve to live as if certain things were true, in the confident assurance that they are true, and that we shall one day find out that they are true.
Dean Inge Personal Religion and the Life of Devotion page 45

Faith is that strange faculty by which man feels the presence of the invisible, exactly as some animals have the power of seeing in the dark. That is the difference between the Christian and the world.

"… Dean Inge’s schoolboy who said, "Faith is believing what you know to be untrue’. Adds the Dean, "It is the resolution to stand or fall by the noblest hypothesis".
From L. Weatherhead: Psychology, Religion and Healing page 427

Faith is always a victory, not simply a weapon which wins victory.

• Faith is vision plus valour.

… Faith is best understood not as a leap into the dark but a leap into the light.

• Faith is the power by which we give ourselves up to anything.

Faith is the assent of the whole man to the message of God.

Faith is the power by which we commit ourselves to anything.
William Law: quoted by J Huxtable

Fear knocked at the door; faith opened it. There was no one there.

All faith is passion and risk.

• Faith is participation in this being of Jesus (incarnation, cross and resurrection) Our relation to God is not a "religious" relationship to the highest most powerful and best being imaginable – that is not authentic transcendence – but our relation to God is a new life in "existence for others", through participation in the being of Jesus.

A time may come when we cannot think of any part of the faith without questioning it, and yet, far from indicating that our faith is in danger, it shows that it is very much alive.
J. Neville Ward: Use of Praying page 141

The Muslims have 99 names for God, but among them all they have not "Our Father".

The benefits of my education seem partly at an end, but that education had been miserably lost If I had not learned to fear something more than misfortune.

This awful fear in which the Papuan lives, Ruth – fear of spirits, of sorcerers, of enemies and of each other.

… Our doubts are traitors
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt.

… No matter, Sir, (said Johnson) they consider it as a compliment to be talked to, as if they were wiser than they are. So true is this, Sir, that Baxter made it a rule in every sermon that he preached, to say something that was above the capacity of his audience.

You have gained battles without cannon, passed rivers without bridges, performed forced marches without shoes, bivouacked without strong liquors, and often without bread. Thanks for your perseverance! But soldiers, you have done nothing for there remains much to do.

Use every man after his desert and who should ‘scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.
William Shakespeare: Hamlet Act II Scene 2

Forgiveness is a beggar’s refuge. You must pay your debts.

Philip Inman one day saw a card bearing the words "This too will pass" upon the desk of the Russian Ambassador, M. Maisky. He asked about it and received the explanation.
"I have had so many varied experiences. Sometimes the crowds have gathered outside the Embassy, booing and jeering – so angry that they would not have stopped at physical violence. Then I have looked at the words on the card and I knew it would pass. At other times the crowds have assembled cheering – when my country came into the war, for instance. Feeling perhaps a little too elated, that card would bring me back down to earth again. That too would pass.

The price of liberty is the restriction of liberty.

No man is free if he fears death.

To be free, to be able to stand up and leave everything behind – without looking back. To say "Yes".

The Americans speak so much about freedom in their sermons. Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church; freedom must be won under the compulsion of necessity. Freedom for the church comes from the necessity of the Word of God. Otherwise it becomes arbitrariness and ends in a great many new ties. Whether the church in America is really free, I doubt.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Way to Freedom pages 240-241

Now I assert that the most precious of all this world’s blessing is
true friendship, which must be accounted not a worldly good but a heavenly blessing; for it is not false fate that produces it, but God, who creates natural friends in kinsmen. For every other thing in this world man desireth either because it will help him to power, or to get some pleasure, save only a true friend; him we love for love’s sake and for our trust in him, though we can hope for no other return from him.

From quiet homes and first beginnings
Out to the discovered ends,
There’s nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends.

There is nothing in the world more precisely unchristian than gambling: for gambling means getting instead of giving – it means deliberately seeking happiness by getting instead of seeking happiness by giving. However small the stake, the act of gambling is a cessation for the time being of that life of love which is the very existence of the Christian.

Act generously and God will be with you.

If you ask me what is Glory? Well I can’t tell you, but I know that it is a hundred times better than Grace. Glory is beauty, moral and spiritual beauty, beauty infinitely real, infinitely exalted, yet infinitely near and infinitely communicable.

God is not unknown. He is unknowable. The mystery in which he shrouds himself is not like a blanket of fog which the fresh winds of new truth will one day disperse.

Mystery is the presence of God. Man cannot with truth locate that presence. God is not outside or beyond the world; he is not above or below; he is neither within nor without. He is an undefined presence, which imposes itself upon man’s experience without uncovering the secret of divine being.

It is a common place of theology that God can’t directly be described. He can be thought and talked about only be images and pictures which point to Him – some of them homely pictures like Our Father, some of them metaphysical causality.

God…that which concerns man ultimately.

To predicate personality of God is nothing else than to declare personality as the absolute.
Feuerbach

Charles de Foucauld…began to drop into churches as he passed them and spent some time repeating one short prayer: "My God, if you exist, make me know you".

We should not talk about God, only to Him.

But to find or know God in reality by any outward proofs, or by anything, but by God himself made manifest and self evident in you, will never be your case, either here or hereafter.

The path from the human to the divine goes through Calvary.

It is not hard to know God, provided one will not force oneself to define Him.
Joubert: quoted by Thomas Keir The Word in Worship page 87

I have found great need of grace and had had an opportunity to practise some of the hardest lessons in Christianity; to bear indignities without animosity, to pray for such as despitefully used me, to love my enemies, to overcome evil with good.

Keep your eyes open to your mercies. That part of piety is eternal, and the man who forgets to be grateful has fallen asleep in life.

Gratitude does not consist of loving a person who does us a service in return. It consists of profiting by the service that has been done so that we can act as well as possible towards the whole of human kind and not only towards the individual to whom we are grateful.

He is truly great that hath great charity. He is truly great that is little in himself and makes no account of any height of honour.

Already at this time, though he was not yet thirty-one, Byron was conscious of a physical decay far in advance of his years, and of a corresponding overwhelming lassitude. "At thirty," he wrote, "there is no more to look forward to … my hair is half grey, and the crows foot had been rather lavish of its indelible steps."

Towards the end of his life, William James, the philosopher,
affirmed that his belief in immortality was stronger than ever, "because he was just getting fit to live".

Always feel a growing of the Lord that is universal and everlasting.

Yesterday and today I have had some glimpses within the veil, as if to prepare me more for what may now soon come. It is very solemn to find myself near the threshold of eternity, my ministry nearly done and my long life coming to its close. Never was Christ more precious to me than He is now.

On his 70th birthday Sir Alexander Fleming was asked what was the formula for a happy old age. He said: ‘Keep on working’.

And this is the happy life, to rejoice to thee, of thee, for thee, this is it, and there is no other.

Happiness is the interest that is paid men by nature for investments in the good life. It is not the reward of perfection. It began as a dividend on the first step in the right direction and it accrues by compound interest.

I am fulfilling in every case to the best of my ability the obligation of being happy.
Joseph Joubert

The substructure contains the four main pagan virtues, taken from Plato: courage, temperance, wisdom, and the all-embracing justice. These produce natural happiness. Happiness does not mean having a good time or having fun, but the fulfilment of one’s own essential nature.

Those who like me, have done many of the pleasant things they ought to have done, and their fair share, perhaps a littler more, of the equally pleasant things they ought not to have done, know that the happiness of having a family outdoes them all! The Dolomites are lovely reflected in the lake of Carezzo, and there was that one unbelievable night sky I saw when camping in Arctic Lapland; Kreisler answering Austrian encore with encore after encore was unforgettable, and there are other things…
But I would exchange the lot if I had to choose, for the sight of two of my own children grubbily playing in a sandpit and the other three gaily setting off for a cycle ride. It matters little to me that I’ve had the good times, or that there are many other things that maybe I’ll do someday, in comparison with the solid, lasting, vivid happiness of having my own children.

I resolved that I would permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
Booker Washington

Hearing in scientific terms is a varying number of vibrations on the eardrums. Intellectually it is composing those sounds into a comprehensible pattern of words: spiritually, it is expressing those ideas in appropriate behaviour.

What is heaven to a reasonable soul? Naught else but Jesus.

It has always seemed to me that the only intelligent and satisfactory principle of life is that of determining both to have one’s cake and eat it.

Hell is not to love anymore. As long as we remain in this life we can still deceive ourselves, think that we live by our own will, that we love independently of God. But we are like madmen stretching out hands to clasp the moon reflected in water.

No person in Hell has the slightest pleasure in other people.

Hell is not where the damned are, but what the damned are.

I thought, "Is any pain like this?" And I was answered in my reason – "Hell is another pain, to despair is there."

Hell is the eternal condition of those who have made relationship with God and their fellows an impossibility through lives which have destroyed love…Heaven, on the other hand is the eternal condition of those who have found real life in relationships through love with God and their fellows.

When we use the term ‘holy’ we must be sure that we mean by it no less than Isaiah – the Radiant Presence of Absolute Righteousness. Holiness must always be personal and moral – a call to worship and service in reverent affection.

In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.

But the Holy is not only that which is; the Holy is also that which ought to be, that which demands justice above all.

Dewdrops are the gems of morning
But the tears of mournful eve!
Where no hope is life’s a warning
That only serves to make us grieve

What oxygen is for the lungs, such is hope for the meaning of human life. Take oxygen away and death occurs through suffocation, take oxygen away and humanity is constricted through lack of breath; despair supervenes, spelling the paralyses of intellectual and spiritual powers by a feeling of the senselessness and purposelessness of existence. As the fate of the human organism is dependent on the supply of oxygen so the fate of humanity is dependent on the supply of hope.

If we are hopeful, in the Christian sense of the word, we shall live and think and work with the resolute conviction that the goal and aim of human life, for ourselves and for others, is that which the bible declares it to be … to be conformed to the Son of God, to be like him, seeing him as he is.
Bishop Frances Paget: quoted by Dean Inge, Personal Religion and the Life of Devotion. Page 54

Hope is an inward attitude of one who is committed to an enterprise. Fundamentally, it is an act of trust.

When we sink at the grave, why the grave has scope,
And over the coffin men planted HOPE!
And it is not a dream of a fancy proud,
With a fool for its dull begetter;
There’s a voice at the heart proclaims aloud –
"We are born for a something Better!"
And that voice of the heart, oh ye may believe,
Will never the hope of the soul deceive.
Translated Lord Lytton

Surely an unteachable spirit is one of the most tragic things in life.

Humility, that low sweet root
From which all heavenly virtues shoot.

Humility before the flower at the timberline is the gate which gives access to the path up the open fell.

How did I weep in thy hymns and canticles, touched to the quick by the voices of thy sweetly attuned church! The voices floated into mine ears, and the truth distilled into my heart, whence my affectionate devotion overflowed, and tears ran down, and happy was I therein. VII Not long had the church of Milan begun to use this kind of consolation and exhortation, the brethren zealously joining with harmony of voice and hearts . . . etc.

It is now a fortnight since the 75th birthday. What a grand day that was! I can still hear the hymns we sang in the morning and evening, with all the voices and instruments. "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation. . . . . shelters thee under his wing and so gently sustaineth." How true it is and may it ever remain so!

Nothing is so important as an idea whose time has come.

The imagination is what providence uses in order to get men into reality, into existence, to get them far enough out, or in, or down in existence. And when imagination has helped them as far out as they are meant to go – that is where reality, properly speaking, begins.

We should begin with the fact, if we are Christians at all (for it [i.e. the doctrine of immortality] just means our part and lot in the Christ who vanquished death) and we should act accordingly. I do not see how a true believer in Christ can doubt the immortality of those who are Christ’s (and He claims all) or require occult assurance of it, which means finding Him unsatisfactory.

A constant dwelling on the sufferings of Christ and of the martyrs may produce in the emotional Christian an altogether admirable indifference to his own pains; but unless he is very careful to cultivate a compassion commensurate with his courage, he may end by becoming indifferent to the pains of others. The child who had sobbed so bitterly because they had hurt and killed poor Jesus was father of the man who fifty years later, did everything in his power to prolong a war which had already caused the death of hundreds of thousands of his fellow creatures and was reducing the survivors to cannibalism.
(of Father Joseph do Paris (1577-1638)

…The Benedictine order owed its existence to the apparent folly of a young man who, instead of doing the proper sensible thing, which was to go through the Roman schools and become an administrator under the Gothic Emperors, went away and for three years lived alone in a hole in the mountains. When he had become ‘a man of much orison’ he emerged, founded monasteries and composed a rule to fit the needs of a self perpetuating, hard-working contemplatives. In the succeeding centuries, the order civilised North Western Europe, introduced or re-established the best agricultural practice of the time, provided the only educational facilities then available and preserved and disseminated the treasures of ancient literature. For generations Benedictinism was the antidote to barbarism. Europe owes an incalculable debt to the young man who, because he was more interested in knowing God than in getting on, or even ‘doing good’ in the world, left Rome for that burrow in the hillside above Subiaco

And a calm even spirit goes through rough work far better than a furious one. Although therefore God did use at the time of the Reformation some sour, overbearing, passionate men, yet he did not use them because they were such, but notwithstanding they were so; and there is no doubt he would have used them much more had they been of a humbler, milder spirit.

Nothing opens the eyes or enlarges the mind like meeting greatness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
Will teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can.

An idea becomes close to you only when you are aware of it in your soul, when in reading about it, it seems to you that it hass already ocurred to you, that you know it and are simply recalling it. That’s how it was when I read the Gospels. In the Gospels I discovered a new world: I had not supposed there was such a depth of thought in them. Yet it all seemed so familiar; it seemed that I had known it all long ago, that I had only forgotten it.

Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they do not know each other; they do not know each other because they cannot communicate; they cannot communicate because they are separate.
Martin Luther King

Joy is the emotional experience which our kind father in heaven has attached to the discharge of the most fundamental of all the higher activities – namely those of inner growth and outer creativeness. Joy is the triumph of life; it is the sign that we are living our true life as spiritual beings.

Love is the motive for working: joy is the strength for working.

The cutting edge of goodness is always joy and the radiant life.

Psychologically joy is the index of health resulting from the adequate engagement of the affections and the vigorous and harmonious exercise of the powers. It is the sign that the soul has found its object.

Turn thine eye upon thyself: and beware thou judgest not the actions of others. In judging of others a man labours in vain: often errs, and easily sins: but in judging and examining himself he always labours fruitfully.

Everything has two handles, one by which it may be borne, the other by which it cannot. If your brother be unjust, do not take up the matter by that handle – the handle of his injustice – for that handle is the one by which it cannot be taken up: but rather by the handle that he is your brother and brought up with you; and you will be taking it up as it can be borne.

When the evening of this life comes you will be judged on love.

It is by justice that we can authentically measure man’s values or his nullity … the absence of justice is the absence of what makes him a man.

Justice may be defined as what Christian love does when confronted by two or more neighbours.

… What we find is power in complete subordination to love; and that is something like a definition of the kingdom of God.

He broke fresh ground - because and only because, he had the courage to go ahead without asking whether others were following or even understood ... etc.

There are two kinds of liberty. The false, where a man is free to do what he likes, and the true, where a man is free to do as he ought.

The Gospel works not by revealing a law but by kindling a life.
Anon

A being breathing thoughtful breath,
A traveller between life and death;

It is not growing like a tree
In bulk doth makes a man better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall at last, dry, bald and sere
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May
Although it fall and die that night -
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in small measures life may perfect be.

They take life forward.
assessment of Scott and Cooper

For life with all it yields of joy or woe is just our chance of the prize of learning love.

Man was made for joy and woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro’ the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine;
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
William Blake: Auguries of Innocence

He looked like a soul, which has found a body by chance, and is trying to make the best of it.
Said of Joseph Joubert by a friend

God likes life; He invented it!
friend of Paul Tournier

Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling, not a mean and grovelling thing that we are called to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny.

No one can be asked a more important question than, "What is your name?" If you can give a name in reply to that first question of the catechism you have a very great possession, for to know your name is to be aware of your own identity, to be able to differentiate yourself from other people, and to feel that you possess your own life. Such an experience as this means that you have a real measure of freedom.

We need to stop asking about the meaning of life and instead think of ourselves as those who are questioned by life… He goes on to quote Nietsche, "He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how’.
Viktor Frankl: Austrian psychiatrist, whose life included a spell in a Nazi death camp.

To be that self one truly is.
Kierkegarde: The Sickness unto Death page 29.

A little thing is a little thing, but faithfulness in a little thing is a big thing.
Japanese proverb

Ultimate reality is incommensurate with our own illusoriness and imperfection; therefore it cannot be understood by means of intellectual operations; for intellectual operations depend on language and our vocabulary and syntax were evolved for the purpose of dealing precisely with that imperfection and illusoriness. Ultimate reality cannot be understood except intuitively, through an act of the will and the affections. ‘Plus diligatur quam intelligatur’ was a common place of scholastic philosophy. ‘Love can go further than understanding’; for love enters where science remains out of doors. We love God in his essence but in his essence we do not see him.

For thus it was made out to me; I loved thee while thou wast committing this sin, I loved thee before, I love thee still, and I will love thee for ever.

He showed me a little thing the size of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and thought: what may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it could last, for it seemed so little that it might suddenly have fallen to nought. And I was answered in my understanding; it lasteth and ever so small because God loveth it. And so the world hath its existence by the love of God.

What we most truly are in the depth of our soul refuses to surrender to force – force from within no more than force from without. That is what St. Augustine meant when he said that Christ’s command to love God is not obeyed if it is obeyed as a command. That is what St. Paul meant when he said, "Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor and though I give my body to be burned and have not charity, it will profit me nothing.

Agape (love or charity) is energetic and beneficent good will which stops at nothing to secure the good of the beloved object. It is not principally an emotion or an affection; it is primarily an active determination of the will. That is why it can be commanded as feeling cannot.

Love found me in the wilderness, at cost
Of painful quests, when I myself had lost.
Love on its shoulders joyfully did lay
Me, weary with the greatness of my way
Love lit the lamp and swept the house all round,
Till the lost money in the end was found.
‘Twas love, whose ever quick and watchful eye
The wanderer’s first step homeward did espy
From its own wardrobe love gave word to bring
What things I needed shoes and robe and ring

It is by love only that one keeps hold on reality.

To turn all we possess into the channels of universal love becomes the business of our lives.

Agape is that form of love in which God loves us and in which we are to love our neighbour – especially if we do not like him.

Let us believe, hope, love, someday there shall be victory.
St Augustine page 89

Now we have agreed that love is in love with what he lacks and does not possess.

Love: the power of union – Dame Julian would say: oneing – and bearing fruit. Sex is the symbol which stands for it, not the thing itself.

Love Thy Neighbour “I must make one confession,” Ivan began. “I could never understand how one could love one’s neighbours. It’s just one’s neighbours, to my mind, that one can’t love, though one might love those at a distance…”

Whoever loved that will not love for ever?

Love is goodwill on fire.

The ways are two: love and want of love. That is all.

To turn all we possess into the channels of universal love becomes the business of our lives.

One cannot even be just to one’s neighbour, unless one loves him.

The ’new morality’ is of course none other than the old morality, just as the new commandment is the old, yet ever fresh, commandment of love. It is what St. Augustine dared to say with his ‘dilige et quod vis fiac’, which as Fletcher rightly insists, should be translated not ‘love and do what you please’ but ‘love and then what you will, do.’

Love means loyalty rather than instinctive emotions. ‘Treat your enemies as men’ is the meaning, for any man has the right to kind treatment and sympathetic prayer.

Perfect love means to love the one through whom one became unhappy. But no man has the right to demand to be thus loved.

Love without power is sentimental and anaemic: power without love is reckless and abusive.

'Be warned by me', says Robert Browning, 'seek only love and leave the rest.

I know my soul hath power to know all things
Yet she is blind and ignorant in all:
I know I'm one of nature's little kings
Yet to the least and vilest things in thrall.

I know my life's a pain and but a span;
I know my sense is mocked in everything;
And, to conclude, I know myself a man
Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.

To become free and responsible. For this alone was man created and he who fails to take the way which could have been his shall be lost eternally.

If this belief from heaven be sent
If such be Nature's holy plan
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man.

Man is only a reed, the feeblest reed in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the entire universe to arm itself in order to annihilate him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. Yet were the universe to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which slays him because he knows that he dies and the advantage the universe has over him; of this the universe knows nothing. Thus all our dignity lies in thought. By thought we must raise ourselves, not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us strive then to think well - therein is the principle of morality.

A man worthy of his name is a man who can stand on his feet and face reality. He is the man who has allowed the Lord to transform his life at the deepest levels of his personality. "It's no longer I who live but Christ who liveth in me."

When a man and woman love they dig a fountain to God.
Hindu proverb

The world is too much with us, late and soon
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in nature that is ours
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.

Meditation first; then follows the deed.

It takes us all our days to learn these two things - to be meek and to be lowly.

And I come to the broad fields and spaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by the senses ... When I enter there, I require what I will to be brought forth and something instantly comes; others must be longer sought for. These things do I within, in that vast court of my memory, for there are present within me, heaven and earth, sea and whatever I have perceived therein ... Great is this force of memory, exceedingly great, O my God, a large and boundless chamber! Whoever sounded the bottom thereof?
St. Augustine Confessions Book 10 Para 8

• He knew that he would be remembered, which is what most men want. As many people who have retired, he pottered around doing the unnecessary with extreme enthusiasm.
Mr. Ghandi said of Motifal Nehru

Mission
• A mission is the renewal of Christ's act in taking flesh and coming on earth to save us; a mission is the telling of the good news to men who do not know it. Both in its etymological sense and according to common speech the word “mission” signifies this sending forth of truth and light to men and societies that lack them
France Pagan Maisie Ward page 72

Money may be the husk of many things, but not the kernel. It brings you food but not appetite; medicine but not health; acquaintance but not friends; servants but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness.

The truth is that non attachment can be practised only in regard to actions intrinsically good or ethically neutral. In spite of anything that Krishna or anyone else may say bad actions are unannihilatable. They are unannihilatable because, as a matter of brute psychological fact, they enhance the separate personal ego of those who perform them. ... Any act which enhances the separate personal ego, automatically diminished the actor's chance of establishing contact with reality …

Life’s evening ever brings with it its own lamp.

There is a tide in the affairs of men which
Taken at the flood leads on to fortune

There is no ill the body suffers, the soul may not profit by.

He said not that thou shall be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be distressed; but He said THOU SHALT NOT BE OVERCOME.

It is on defeats that victories are built.

O! My native country, that thou mightest be the first nation in this age of the world that might pass through the judgements of God, and be cleansed thereby and be happy.

It belongs to my Christian profession to be vilified, slandered, reproached and reviled. And since all this is nothing else, as my God and my conscience do bear me witness, I rejoice in reproaches for Christ's sake.

I can plod, that is my only genius. I can persevere in any definite pursuit. To this I owe everything.

The Christian Gospel is the revelation of God's patience, of the costliness of God's forgiveness. Such patience as we have shown has often been a sign of weakness; we have not cared enough to bother. But God has always cared. He has cared enough not only to wait but to suffer.

Power is never good unless he who has it is good.

If we are right, and to be spiritually minded is to have the mind of Christ, then prayer is from first to last a school of courage, an exercise in manliness, and the spiritual life is a discipline in hardihood.

Prayer is not so much asking as receiving.

Prayer is the simplest form of speech
That infant lips can try;
Prayer the sublimest strains that reach
The majesty on high

Then the Tempter again laid at me very sore, suggesting that neither the mercy of God, nor yet the blood of Christ did at all concern me, nor could they help me for my sin; therefore it was but in vain to pray. Yet thought I, I will pray. But, said the Tempter, your sin is unpardonable. Well, said I, I will pray, It is to no boot, said he. Yet, said I, I will pray. So I went to prayer to God.

The first thing that occurs to us is that all the machinery of prayer has but one very simple object, our loving intercourse with God.

Prayer is seed sown on the heart of God.

(Francis of Assisi) had been invited to spend a night in the house of a rich citizen of Assisi. The two men slept in one room and soon after they had retired to bed Francis rose silently and began to pray. Only four words escaped his lips: "Deus meus et omnia". (My God and my all) - but he continued to murmur these words over and over again till daybreak.

Prayer is the only adequate confession of faith.
Wellhausen

Dr. Johnson was asked, "What is the strongest argument for prayer?" He replied, "Sir, there is no argument for prayer."

Prayer is openness to the ground of our being; and in it "the readiness is all."
Bishop of Woolwich: Honest to God

The Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer that is not contained in it. It is to prayer what it it to humanity. It is impossible to say it once through giving the fullest possible attention to each word, without a change, infinitesimal perhaps, but real, taking place in the soul.

In the Christian view, prayer is principally the means which believers use to maintain their relationship with God, their responsiveness to his will for them, their particular understanding of life in terms of his revelation in Christ.

Because charity is the power of God, the only power by which His kingdom can be extended amongst men, it will only be when we doubt the power of charity that we shall be troubled by the question, "Can our praying make a difference?" To pray is to open the heart to the entry of love - to ask God in; and where God is truly wanted, he will always come. By that union the universal working of the love of God has increase.

What we need is an understanding of prayer as withdrawal, rest, relaxation, preparation, even joy, recreation, 'a change', 'a holiday, a break. Prayer is exactly the renewal one man received from walking in his garden. etc.

Prayer is the responsibility to meet God with all I have ... to expect to meet God in the way, not to turn aside from the way. All else is exercise towards that or reflection upon the depth of it.

But while he (Arnold Bennett) with his keen observation of life, was telling people how to manage their lives he had no ideal for his own life worthy of his abilities.

Take heed to yourselves, lest you may unsay that with your lives which you say with your tongues, and be the greatest hinderers of the success of your own labours. It much hindereth our work when other men are, all the week long contradicting to poor people in private that which we have have been speaking to them from the word of God in public, because we cannot be at hand to manifest their folly: but it will much more hinder if we contradict ourselves and if your actions give the tongue the lie ..... One proud, surly, lordly word, one needless contention, one covetous action, may cut the throat of many a sermon.
Richard Baxter, to ministers of Worcester,

I find more profit in sermons on either good temper or good works than in what are commonly called 'gospel sermons'. That term has now become a mere cant word; I wish none of our society would use it. It has no determinate meaning. Let but a pert, self-sufficient animal, that has neither grace nor sense, bawl out something about Christ or his blood or justification by faith and his hearers cry out, 'What a fine gospel sermon!’.
John Wesley Works Edition 1872 Volume 13 page 36

Have been struck at noticing how often, in going forth to preach, I was like one seeking his own entrance into the holy place and fellowship with God: not like one coming out from enjoying communion to speak to others.

I wish to pray from this date every Sabbath morning before going out to preach, and every time I go to preach to stand still a little and praise the Lord for sending to sinners his glorious gospel.

Did you ever feel in preaching as if you were a blunt arrow? I felt so yesterday until about evening, when the archer seemed to sharpen the point.

Dr. Black to Preachers: Your business is serious gunfire with a target.

I was sent to feed the sheep, not to amuse the goats.

Nor was he scant and short in his sermons, but usually long, two hours at least, often three, yea, sometimes he would even continue four or five hours, praying and preaching; his heart was so set on his master's work, that he forgot his own strength and his hearers' patience. Nor did he tediously dream over his work, but was full of zeal, vigour, tenderness and affection, often strained his voice beyond what his natural strength could well bear, which occasioned torturing and mortal disease. Like a candle he spent himself to give others light.
said of Nathaniel Heywood

If a man is going to sleep in my congregation, don't wake him up, wake me up.

9th November 1851. At the church of St. Gervaise, a second sermon from Adolphe Monod. Subject: Paul or the active life of the Christian. I felt the golden spell of eloquence; I found myself hanging on the lips of the orator, fascinated by his boldness, his grace, his energy and his art, his sincerity and his talent; and it was born in upon me that for some men difficulties are a source of inspiration, so that what would make others stumble is for them the occasion of their highest triumphs. He made St. Paul cry during an hour and a half; he made an old nurse of him, he hunted up his old cloak, his prescriptions of water and wine for Timothy, the canvas that he mended, his friend Tychieus, - in short all that could raise a smile; and from it he drew the most unfailing pathos, the most austere and penetrating lessons. He made the whole of St. Paul, martyr, apostle and man, - his grief, his charities, his tenderness - live again before us, and this with a grandeur and unction a warmth of reality such as I had never seen equalled ..... Finally, as a peroration, he dwelt on the necessity for a new people, for a stronger generation if the world is to be saved from the terrors which threaten it. 'People of God, awake! Sow in tears that ye may reap in triumph!' What a study is such a sermon! I felt all the extraordinary literary skill of it, while my eyes were still dim with tears. Diction, composition, similes - all instructive and precious to remember. I was astonished, shaken, taken hold of.

Neither was he voxet praeterim nihil, a mere voice and no more, as some preachers who like thunder make a loud noise, without any distinct or significant sound: no, his sermons abounded with solid divinity, scripture arguments, alluring similes and heart-melting passages. He was an excellent text man producing judicious(?) interpretations; an experienced casuist, resolving cases of conscience with correct discrimination. A clear disputant, stating controversies accurately and distinctly, answering objections skilfully and satisfactorily and proving the truth to a demonstration. He was a pathetic preacher, riveting the nail by faithful appeals to the consciences of his hearers.
Of Nathaniel Heywood

To be close to God is the only way of bringing God close to man.
Abbe Godin (see France Pagan M. Ward page 56)

O what a thing it is to have a curum animarum! You and I are called to this: to save souls from death; to watch over as those that must give account! If our office implied no more than preaching a few times in a week, I could play with it; so might God.

I preached as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.

Bishop Quayle, the pulpit totem man of America's mid west commented that preaching is not the art of making a sermon and then delivering it but of making a preacher and delivering that.

Let no preacher give up the faith that God wants to do a deed through him
Martin Luther

But, I say, my neighbours were amazed at this my great conversion from prodigious profaneness to something like a moral life and sober man. Now, therefore, they began to praise, to commend, and to speak well of me, both to my face and behind my back. Now I was, as they said, become Godly: now I was become a right honest man. But oh, when I understood those were their words and opinions of me, it pleased me mighty well! For though as yet I was nothing but a poor painted hypocrite, yet I loved to talked of as one who was truly Godly. I was proud of my Godliness, and indeed, I did all I could either to be seen or well spoken of by men. And thus I continued for about a twelve month or more.
Para 32
... But all this while, when I thought I kept this or that commandment, or did by word or deed, anything I thought was good, I had great peace in my conscience, and would think with myself, God cannot choose but be well pleased with me: yea, to relate it in my own way, I thought no man in England could please God better than I.

There is a power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,
The desert and illimitable air
Lone wandering, but not lost.
He who from zone to zone
Guides through the boundless sky
Thy certain flight
In the long way that I must
tread alone
Will lead my steps aright

Bryant

Let nothing be great unto thee, nothing high, nothing pleasing, nothing acceptable; but simply God or that which is of God.

Perhaps it is God's plan that we should wait for purgatory before we begin to be confronted with a great deal of what is inside us etc ... or to put into religious language, when we receive more of what we are it means that for us purgatory has begun.

To acquire heart treasure withdraw from the world. At some times learn to sequester yourselves from the cares, affairs. comforts, cumbers and company here below. Do not think you can hoard up in a crowd. Satan loves to fish in troubled waters. But so doth not Christ... in this you must be separatists.
He concludes by quoting Herbert's "By all means use some time to be alone". etc.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves

The Indian religions train men to recollectedness... we are too much inclined to imagine that Christianity is merely activity. We do not have enough inwardness, we are not sufficiently preoccupied with our own spiritual life, we lack quietness.

Some indeed have urged the holy kiss; but then I have asked why they made balks - why they did salute the most handsome, and let the ill favoured go.

John Wesley after his experience at Aldersgate St. ..."He was much tempted when he returned home, but when he prayed the temptation fled."
Journal page 48 May 24th 1738

Whitehead defined religion as "the attitude which the individual takes up towards the determiner of his destiny".

The feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.

The definition of religion as self-transcendence of life in the dimension of the spirit.

A felt practical relationship with what is believed in as a superhuman being or beings.
R.H. Thouless Introduction to the Psychology of Religion page 4

Religion is knowing profoundly what you know already.

Religion is response to God. True religion will be the right response to God in that environment in which our lives are set.

The greatest aim of all religion is to transfer the centre of interest from self to God.

...He lays emphasis on what he calls "Acts of Resignation ". By this he means facing actual difficulties in our lives, things which are very likely to happen, or which are now happening and making acts of entire acceptance of the divine will in their regard. This exercise as he calls it is most salutary. When we reflect upon all the misery and turmoil and controversy about trifles that is caused by resistance to holy life as it comes to us, when we think of all the unhappy, disappointed, frustrated people we know, we realise how this spirit of acceptance would completely alter their lives.

They have often been hammering the nails into the Church's coffin when she rose again.

...Revenge, at first though sweet
Bitter ere long , back on itself recoils

Just think of Eugene Sue, who has written himself into a millionaire by describing poverty and misery: yes, he was capable of giving Rd50 to the poor for having been the fortunate man to whom the envious opportunity was given - of playing the hero, the witness to the truth, with applause and laurel leaves.

The vine from every living limb bleeds wine:
Is it the poorer for that spirit shed? ...
Measure thy life by loss instead of gain,
Not by the wine drunk, but the wine poured forth
For love's strength standeth in love's sacrifice,
And whoso suffers most hath most to give.
Mrs. Hamilton King: The Disciples

If people ever speak to you of the things a missionary has to give up, tell them, from one who knows, that for every single thing one gives up, one receives back in happiness, friendship, in the joy of creative work, and I think, in a growing awareness of the Lord, much more than a hundredfold.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

Saints A definition: "Because they were cheerful when it was difficult to be cheerful, and patient when it was difficult to be patient and because they pushed on when they wanted to stand still, and kept silent when they wanted to talk and were agreeable when they wanted to be disagreeable.

I think it is a very poor kind of holiness that does not make us care for others.

Saints are those, who in life, in spirit and in deed, clearly and unmistakably show us that God lives

Saints are people who let the light through.
Unattributed

Though psychological salvation consists in crossing over from one camp to the other, (i.e. from the weak to the strong) religious salvation lies in the rediscovery of the divine purpose, in which the instinct of life and the moral conscience each have the proper function in the person for which they were designed by God. No doubt that purpose is never fully realised in this world. But case after case has shown that the road to health both for the person and for society lies in a genuine experience of the grace of God.

Nothing exists except matter and energy; man is a hairless monkey; therefore everyone must lay down his life for his friends.
Vladimir Solovyov 19th century philosopher,

To be a seeker is to be of the best sect next to a finder and such shall be every faithful, humble seeker at the end.

How far both from muscular heroism and from the soulfully tragic spirit of unselfishness which unctuously adds its little offering to the sponge cake at the Kaffee Klatch is the plain simple fact that a man has given himself completely to something he finds worth living for.

And this should be our business to conquer ourselves: and daily wax stronger than ourselves: and make some growth in holiness.

An humble knowledge of thyself is a surer way to God than a deep search after learning

Fine clothes are a great assistance to our good opinion of ourselves. There is a story of a Frenchwoman who remarked that a well-fitting frock gave a sensation of peace and well-being that religion was powerless to convey.

A child who is taught to believe that he is essentially good, though subject to lapses which effort may cure, has a better chance of really becoming good than one who is always being told that "he is a naughty boy and likely to come to a bad end". In school, therefore, we must refrain from labelling A as a dunce and B as untidy or C as a nuisance. They quickly adopt this view of themselves and live up to it.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours; yours are the eyes through which is to look on Christ's compassion in the world, yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good and yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.

God takes much pleasure in adverbs: it pleaseth not God that a duty be done except it be well done.

O make my life simple and straight like a flute or reed for thee to play on.

A wise man can hold his own here only if he can combine simplicity with wisdom ... because the simple man knows God.

I don't use the word sin much - it is more a sense of waste.

Whatever hurts another, demeans another, whatever make persons objects to be used, that is sin, the denial of God.

Sin means the power that separates us from God.

Paul is trying to grapple with that rift in **** personality given to the power behind the unbelief which prevents us from thinking straight, which led him to believe in Christ as an indication between the hidden God...

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Without thee, what is all the morning's wealth.

I saw a thistledown pass over, and in that instant proof without a flaw knew God, whose righteousness endures for ever.

I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big successes, and I am for those tiny, molecular forces that work for the individual creeping through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets or like a capillary oozing of water, yet which, if given time will rend the hardest monument of man's pride.

I have sometimes thought that the idea of the "spiritual" in the New Testament might be best explicated by means of the modern concept of "personal". The psychikos and the sarkos are really what belong to the sub-personal realm. The man whose life is confined to these levels is living a sub-personal life. Relationships which never rise above them are not truly personal relationships at all. And no man is living his true life in personal communion with other persons, and above all in that basic personal relationship with God which we call religion.

The everlastingness of things - an ironic comment upon your claims to ownership.

I sympathise a great deal with the listener who replied to every argument on the love of God by the simple question, "What about cancer in fish?"

Those who have suffered a great deal acquire a wide range of vision; their attitude towards others and towards life in general is wise, mature, human.
Svetlana (Stakin) Alleluyera)

"The darkness," exclaimed Kagawa of Japan, describing what it felt like when he thought he was going blind, "the darkness is a holy of holies of which no-one can rob me. In the darkness I meet God face
to face.

In order to understand suffering we have to understand Christ; for it is Christ alone who explains it. Without Christ, suffering remains a horrible and meaningless misfortune. With Christ it becomes an honour and the guarantee of heaven - for those who relieve as well as those who endure.

At the time of the persecution of Quakers, 1661 "... The prisons were full of them, a continual source of irritation to the magistrates" ... "For this I can say, wrote one, "I never since played the coward but joyfully entered prisons as palaces, telling mine enemies to hold me there as long as they could, and in the prison house I sung praises to my God and esteemed the bolts and locks put upon me as jewels".

When a man of goodwill is afflicted or tempted or troubled with evil thoughts; then he understands better the great need he has of God; without whom he perceives he can do nothing that is good.

Pain is the spur to activity and only through pain do we feel ourselves to be fully alive. Without pain we should be lifeless.

See also Pain

The origin of susceptibility determines some of the characteristics. We accept suggestions from the group as a whole e.g. when we take the tone of an institution from membership of it ... or from someone who impresses us a a leader'

Strenuously cultivating self-reliance and a self-esteem founded on the just and right, he lived his whole life in happy ignorance of the fact that religion consists in the exact opposite of self-reliance and self-esteem - in total self-surrender to a God who is not merely a very virtuous puritan gentleman, considerably magnified, but a being of a wholly different order.
(0f Milton) A Huxley Grey Eminence pages 131-2

It doesn't take much of a man to be a Christian, but it takes all there is of him.

When I was thus deliberating upon serving the Lord my God now, as I had long purposed, it was I who willed, I. I, myself. I neither willed entirely, nor willed entirely (sic). Therefore was I at strife with myself, and rent asunder by my self.

The real Satan is the element in every being which hinders that being from dying to its selfhood and becoming united with the reality from which it has been separated.
A. Huxley Grey Eminence page 132

Compel your enemy to fight you on your own parade ground.

The cross has always been a window into the heart of God, the supreme means of awakening men to the overwhelming and humbling reality of God’s amazing love. And without it, faith could only have made its home in the shadows of half knowledge and dim guesses. In its light, the pattern of sin and holiness, of grossness and purity stand out in the clearest relief and we know both for what they are. That is why the Cross has always at one and the same time convinced men of sin and convinced them of the reality of forgiveness, has both diagnosed the disease and provided the remedy.

Thus Lord, I must gather my body, my heart, my spirit and stretch myself at full length on the cross of the present moment. I haven’t the right to choose the wood of my passion. The cross is ready to my measure.

We talk of the Gospel as Good News. But in fact it is bad news for some because it strikes at the heart of human egotism and selfishness. Jesus recognised this when he claimed not to bring peace but a sword.

The world is a bridge; pass thou over it but build not on it.

We can all do good deeds but very few of us can think good thoughts.
Cesare Pavese quoted by W. H. Auden in Markings page 12

When as a child I laughed and wept, time crept.
When as a youth I dreamed and talked, time walked
When I became a full grown man, time ran
And later as I older grew, time flew.
Soon I shall find while travelling on, time gone.
Will Christ have saved my soul by then?

Theodore Buza, Calvin's successor at Geneva stigmatised religious liberty as "a most diabolical dogma, because it means that every man should be left to go to hell in his own way". The same logic was being used by his contemporary, William Allen in England, a papal spokesman who contended strongly that it was against the laws of God and nature to persecute Romists, but that heretics might lawfully be 'coerced'

More charity is shown by by the Jewish mystic, Martin Buber, who writes, "All God's names are hallowed".

The Archbishop of York, Dr. Ramsey told York diocesan conference recently that in an Indian community in Labrador people were still praying for Queen Victoria. When they were urged to come up to date and pray for the reigning sovereign they protested that they had from the first prayed for Queen Victoria and wished to continue.

Truth is our only armour in all passages of life and death.

Sympathy, folk often say, is the balm to the troubled spirit; the genuine cure for such troubles is not balm, but the sting of truth.

The enquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it, and the belief in truth, which is the enjoying of it - is the sovereign good of human nature
Bacon

The mark of real depth is simplicity. If you should say, "This is too profound for me; I cannot grasp it," you are self deceptive. For you ought to know that nothing of real importance is too profound for anyone. It is not because it is too profound, but rather because it is too uncomfortable, that you shy away from the truth.

Truth is polygonal. I never feel sure that I have got it until I have contradicted myself five or six times.

To suppose that religious truth can be communicated directly as though it were mathematical truth or logical method is a shallow blasphemy. All that religious truth can do is present itself as challenge since the only way it can be apprehended is by faith.

The truth that is troubled is the truth which, while itself is terribly certain of being the truth, is essentially concerned with communicating it to others, concerned that they should accept it for their own good, in spite of the fact that the truth does not force itself on them.

Kierkegaard's famous definition of truth reads, "An objective uncertainty held fast on the most passionate personal experience is the truth, the highest truth attained for an existing individual". This, he continues is the definition of faith. Tillich later continues, The validating of the truth which appears in a passionate personal experience is based on the relation of the Eternal to the existing individual.