By Henry Drummond
Love is greater than faith, because the end is greater than the means.
The soul is to be made sweet not by taking the acidulous fluids out, but by putting something in—a great love, God’s great love.
To be beside oneself for Christ’s sake is to be beside Christ, which is man’s chief end for time and eternity.
The man who is really concerned to live well must possess himself continually of the thought that he is not to live long.
God is our Father, but God is our Judge. When we know that, our sin takes on a darker colouring entirely.
Sanctity is in character and not in moods; Divinity in our own plain calm humanity, and in no mystic rapture of the soul.
How many things we permit ourselves on the theory that life is great, would be most emphatically wrong on the theory that time was also great!
One of the chief reasons why life is so great is just that life is so short.
The stages by which this transcendent standpoint is to be reached are now plainly before us. They are, the discovery of self and the discovery of Christ.
For Love understands, and therefore waits.
Christianity, you will observe, really works. And it succeeds not only because it is divine, but because it is so very human—because it is common-sense.
There is something in every man’s life which he needs saving from, something which would spoil his life and run off with it.
It is God looking into the sinner’s face that has introduced a Christian element into human sorrow.
Men, only men, can carry out this work. This humanness, this inwardness, of the Kingdom is one reason why some scarcely see that it exists at all.
Love is Patience. This is the normal attitude of Love—Love passive, Love waiting to begin; not in a hurry; calm; ready to do its work when the summons comes, but meantime wearing the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit.
Great principles are always best and freshest when studied from the life, and it so happens that a circumstance in Paul’s life makes it peculiarly easy to act on this rule here.
All men are mirrors—that is the first law on which this formula is based. One of the aptest descriptions of a human being is that he is a mirror.
Nothing that it contains is worth the life and consecration of an immortal soul. The immortal soul must give itself to something that is immortal.
It may be nobler to suffer God’s will than to do it, perhaps it is. But there is nothing noble in resignation of this sort—this resignation under protest as it were.
There is no middle way in religion—self or Christ. The quality of the selfishness—intellectual, literary, artistic—the fact that our self’s centre may be of a superior order of self, does nothing to destroy this grave distinction.
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