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BUSHNELL, Horace Quotes
(1802-1876), American clergyman
I have learned more of experimental religion since my little boy died than in all my life before.
Anxiety is a word of unbelief or unreasoning dread.—We have no right to allow it. Full faith in God puts it to rest.
The Christian needs a reminder every hour; some defeat, surprise, adversity, peril; to be agitated, mortified, beaten out of his course, so that all remains of self will be sifted out.
A house without a roof would scarcely be a more different home, than a family unsheltered by God's friendship, and the sense of being always rested in His providential care and guidance.
Guilt is the very nerve of sorrow.
Habits are to the soul what the veins and arteries are to the blood, the courses in which it moves.
If you had the seeds of pestilence in your body you would not have a more active contagion than you have in your tempers, tastes, and principles.—Simply to be in this world, whatever you are, is to exert an influence—an influence too, compared with which mere language and persuasion are feeble.
Every man's life is a plan of God.
Live as with God; and whatever be your calling, pray for the gift that will perfectly qualify you in it.
Morality, taken as apart from religion, is but another name for decency in sin. It is just that negative species of virtue which consists in not doing what is scandalously depraved and wicked. But there is no heart of holy principle in it, any more than there is in the grosser sin.
It is not necessary for all men to be great in action. The greatest and sublimest power is often simple patience.
By moral power we mean the power of a life and a character, the power of good and great purposes, the power which comes at length to reside in a man distinguished in some course of estimable or great conduct.—No other power of man compares with this, and there is no individual who may not be measurably invested with it.
Christ is redemption to us, only as he actually redeems and delivers our nature from sin. If he is not the law and spring of a new spirit of life, he is nothing to us. "As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God,"—as many; no more.
It is only religion, the great bond of love and duty to God that makes any existence valuable or even tolerable.
The noblest charities, the best fruits of learning, the richest discoveries, the best institutions of law and justice, every greatest thing the world has seen, represents, more or less directly, the fruitfulness and creativeness of religion.
An everyday religion—one that loves the duties of our common walk; one that makes an honest man; one that accomplishes an intellectual and moral growth in the subject; one that works in all weather, and improves all opportunities, will best and most healthily promote the growth of a church and the power of the Gospel.
Respectable sin is, in principle, the mother of all basest crime.—Follow it to the bitter end, and there is ignominy as well as guilt eternal.
Trust God for great things; with your five loaves and two fishes, he will show you a way to feed thousands.
There is no fit search after truth which does not, first of all, begin to live the truth which it knows.
No state of virtue is complete save as it is won by a conflict with evil, and fortified by the struggles of a resolute and even bitter experience.
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