Self-loathing is not sorrow. Yet it is good, for it marks a step in the way home, and in the father’s arms the prodigal forgets the self he abominates. Once with his father, he is to himself of no more account.
You ought to have principles of your own, Mr Walton.” “I hope I have. And one of them is, not to make mountains of molehills; for a molehill is not a mountain. A man ought to have too much to do in obeying his conscience and keeping his soul’s garments clean, to mind whether he wears black or white when telling his flock that God loves them, and that they will never be happy till they believe it.
She began to learn that nothing is dead, that there cannot be a physical abstraction, that nothing exists for the sake of the laws of its phenomena.
That’s all nonsense,” said Curdie. “I don’t know what you mean.” “Then if you don’t know what I mean, what right have you to call it nonsense?
Nothing that could be got from the heart of the earth could have been put to better purposes than the silver the king’s miners got for him. There were people in the country who, when it came into their hands, degraded it by locking it up in a chest, and then it grew diseased and was called mammon, and bred all sorts of quarrels; but when first it left the king’s hands it never made any but friends, and the air of the world kept it clean.
These are they who gather grace, as the mountain-tops the snow, to send down rivers of water to their fellows.
When I am out of sight, he may think of me again and want to see me – as Job said his maker would.” “I don’t remember,” said Barbara. “Tell me.” “He says to God – I was reading it the other day – ‘I wish you would hide me in the grave till you’ve done being angry with me! Then you would want to see again the creature you had made; you would call me, and I would answer!’ God’s not like that, of course, but my father might be.
Really he was not an interesting man: short, broad, stout, red-faced, with an immense amount of mental inertia, discharging itself in constant lingual activity about little nothings.
In seeking to improve their conditions, might I not do them harm, and only harm?
It was now dark enough for me to see that every flower was shining with a light of its own.
How many things are there in the world in which the wisest of us can ill descry the hand of God! Who not knowing could read the lily in its bulb, the great oak in the pebble-like acorn? God’s beginnings do not look like his endings, but they are like; the oak is in the acorn, though we cannot see it.
No man knows it when he is making an idiot of himself.
The causing of the little ones to offend hangs a fearful woe about the neck of the causer.
There was the lamp – dead indeed, and so changed that she would never have taken it for a lamp but for the shape! No, it was not the lamp anymore now it was dead, for all that made it a lamp was gone, namely, the bright shining of it.
But it is no use trying to account for things in Fairy Land; and one who travels there soon learns to forget the very idea of doing so, and takes everything as it comes; like a child, who, being in a chronic condition of wonder, is surprised at nothing.
Divine Fire The fire of God, which is His essential being, His love, His creative power, is a fire unlike its earthly symbol in this, that it is only at a distance it burns – that the further from Him, it burns the worse.
It is the vile falsehood and miserable unreality of Christians, their faithlessness to their Master, their love of their own wretched sects, their worldliness and unchristianity, their talking and not doing, that has to answer, I suspect, for the greater part of our present atheism.
Those who are content with what they are, have the less concern about what they seem.
To be conceited of doing one’s duty is, then, a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it.
In God we live every commonplace as well as most exalted moment of our being. To trust in Him when no need is pressing, when things seem going right of themselves, may be harder than when things seem going wrong.