From The Ideal Life, by Henry Drummond
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!
There is more in salvation than forgiveness. And why? Because there is more in sin than guilt, my friend.
God is our Father, but God is our Judge. When we know that, our sin takes on a darker colouring entirely.
A consistent eccentricity is the only sane life. An enthusiastic religion is the perfection of common sense.
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.
It is God looking into the sinner’s face that has introduced a Christian element into human sorrow.
There is something in every man’s life which he needs saving from, something which would spoil his life and run off with it.
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.
As he grows in grace, he grows in isolation. He feels that God is detaching his life from all around it.
The man who is really concerned to live well must possess himself continually of the thought that he is not to live long.
One of the chief reasons why life is so great is just that life is so short.
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.
We are guilty for our past lives. We may be sorry for the past. But it is not enough that we are sorry.
It is hard for a man to forget pictures which have been hanging in the galleries of his imagination all his life.
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.
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.
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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