Guidance & Wisdom
The one redeeming feature of the self-sufficient method is this—that those who try it find out almost at once that it will not gain the goal.
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.
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.
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.
The name by which this Society was known was The Kingdom of God.
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.
Sanctity is in character and not in moods; Divinity in our own plain calm humanity, and in no mystic rapture of the soul.
No man can change himself.
A consistent eccentricity is the only sane life. An enthusiastic religion is the perfection of common sense.
To make Cities—that is what we are here for. To make good Cities—that is for the present hour the main work of Christianity. For the City is strategic.
God is our Father, but God is our Judge. When we know that, our sin takes on a darker colouring entirely.
We measure great movements by the loudness of their advertisement, or the place their externals fill in the public eye. This Kingdom has no externals.
It is hard for a man to forget pictures which have been hanging in the galleries of his imagination all his life.
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.
There is one kind of cause for every particular effect, and no other; and if one particular effect is desired, the corresponding cause must be set in motion.
A Christian must be different from other people. Time has not changed the essential difference between the spirit of the world and the spirit of Christ.
His immediate work was to enlist men in His enterprise, to rally them into a great company or Society for the carrying out of His plans.
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 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.
It is because to large masses of people Christianity has become synonymous with a Temple service that other large masses of people decline to touch it. It is a mistake to suppose that the working classes of this country are opposed to Christianity. No man can ever be opposed to Christianity who knows what it really is.
MannaScroll