Never wait for fitter time or place to talk to Him. To wait till thou go to church or to thy closet is to make Him wait. He will listen as thou walkest.
Is it not time I lost a few things when I care for them so unreasonably? This losing of things is of the mercy of God: It comes to teach us to let them go.
And why should the good of anyone depend on the prayer of another? I can only answer with the return question, ‘Why should my love be powerless to help another?
There is endless room for rebellion against ourselves.
Knowlegde no doubt made bad people worse, but it must make good people better!
I will be glad!” he said, “even in the midst of a world of rain! – Yet again, why should the mere look of a rainy night make it needful for me to assert joy and resist sadness? – After all, what is there to be merry about, in this best of possible worlds? I like going to the theatre; but if I don’t like the play, am I to be pleased all the same, sit it out with smiles, and applaud at the end? – I don’t see what there is to make me miserable, and I don’t see what there is to make me glad!
A man is enslaved to anything he cannot part with which is less than himself.
There had been a time in Godfrey’s life when, had she stood before him in all her splendor, he would have turned from her, because of her history, with a sad disgust. Was he less pure now? He was more pure, for he was humbler.
Light unshared is darkness. To be light indeed, it must shine out. It is of the very essence of light, that it is for others.
The righteousness that makes a man visit the sins of a father upon his children, is the righteousness of a devil, not the righteousness of God. When God visits the sins of a father on his children, it is to deliver the child from his own sins through yielding to inherited temptation.
Do you ask, “What is faith in Him?” I answer, The leaving of your way, your objects, your self, and the taking of His and Him; the leaving of your trust in men, in money, in opinion, in character, in atonement itself, and doing as He tells you. I can find no words strong enough to serve for the weight of this obedience.
The sin he dwells in, the sin he will not come out of, is the sole ruin of a man. His present, his live sins, those pervading his thoughts and ruling his conduct; the sins he keeps doing, and will not give up; the sins he is called to abandon, and clings to; the same sins which are the cause of his misery, though he may not know it, these are they for which he is even now condemned.
That is why hardships, troubles, disappointments, and all kinds of pain and suffering, are sent to so many of us. We are so full of ourselves, and feel so grand, that we should never come to know what poor creatures we are, never begin to do better, but for the knock-down blows that the loving God gives us. We do not like them, but he does not spare us for that. A Rough Shaking, ch.
Only a pure heart can understand, and a pure heart is one that sends out ready hands.
For each, God has a different response. With every man He has a secret – the secret of a new name. In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter. I say not it is the innermost chamber.
The more people trust in God, the less will they trust their own judgments, or interfere with the ordering of events.
That which is within a man, not that which lies beyond his vision, is the main factor in what is about to befall him:.
Spiritual Murder It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the idea of the hated.
If a man keeps the law, I know he is a lover of his neighbour. But he is not a lover because he keeps the law: he keeps the law because he is a lover. No heart will be content with the law for love. The law cannot fulfil love.
Impossibilities “I thank thee, Lord, for forgiving me, but I prefer staying in the darkness: forgive me that too.” – “No; that cannot be. The one thing that cannot be forgiven is the sin of choosing to be evil, of refusing deliverance. It is impossible to forgive that. It would be to take part in it.