|
BROOKS, Phillips Quotes
(1835-1893), American Episcopalian bishop
There is such a difference between coming out of sorrow merely thankful for belief, and coming out of sorrow full of sympathy with, and trust in, Him who has released us.
It is good for us to think that no grace or blessing is truly ours till we are aware that God has blessed some one else with it through us.
Jesus Christ, the condescension of divinity, and the exaltation of humanity.
The only way to realize that we are God's children is to let Christ lead us to our Father.
The copy-books tell us that "to err is human." That is wrong. To err is inhuman, to be holy is to live in the straight line of duty and of truth to God's life in every intrinsic existence.
No man has come to true greatness who has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to his race, and that what God gives him he gives him for mankind.
No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle and pure and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.
If we could sweep intemperance out of the country, there would be hardly poverty enough left to give healthy exercise to the charitable impulses.
It is good for us to think no grace or blessing truly ours till we are aware that God has blessed some one else with it through us.
There is not one life which the Life-giver ever loses out of His sight; not one which sins so that He casts it away; not one which is not so near to Him that whatever touches it touches Him with sorrow or with joy.
Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God's Paradise.
There are no times in life when opportunity, the chance to be and do, gathers so richly about the soul as when it has to suffer. Then everything depends on whether the man turns to the lower or the higher helps. If he resorts to mere expedients and tricks the opportunity is lost. He comes out no richer nor greater; nay, he comes out harder, poorer, smaller for his pain. But, if he turns to God, the hour of suffering is the turning hour of his life.
A prayer in its simplest definition is merely a wish turned Godward.
While men believe in the possibilities of children being religious, they are largely failing to make them so, because they are offering them not a child's but a man's religion—men's forms of truth and men's forms of experience.
Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely way, there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple.
We anticipate a time when the love of truth shall have come up to our love of liberty, and men shall be cordially tolerant and earnest believers both at once.
Christianity knows no truth, which is not the child of love and the parent of duty.
|
