Three Thousand Selected Quotations from Brilliant Writers/L
LABOR
Labor is not, as some have erroneously supposed, a penal clause of the original curse. There was labor, bright, healthful, unfatiguing, in unfallen Paradise. By sin, labor became drudgery—the earth was restrained from her spontaneous fertility, and the strong arm of the husbandman was required, not to develop, but to "subdue" it. But labor in itself is noble, and is necessary for the ripe unfolding of the highest life.
Labor is the true alchemist that beats out in patient transmutation the baser metals into gold.
Nothing is denied to well-directed labor; nothing is ever to be attained without it.
It is intended that we shall accomplish all, through law, that we can accomplish for ourselves. God gives every bird its food, but does not throw it into the nest. He does not unearth the good that the earth contains, but He puts it in our way, and gives us the means of getting it ourselves.
Blessed is the man who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. Know thy work, and do it; and work at it like Hercules. One monster there is in the world, the idle man.
God does not give excellence to men but as the reward of labor.
No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him. There is always work, and tools to work withal, for those who will.
Work is God's ordinance as truly as prayer.
The virtues, like the body, become strong more by labor than by nourishment.
The more we work the more we need to pray. In this day of activity there is great danger, not of doing too much, but of praying too little for so much work.
Jesus aimed to impregnate the natural with the spiritual, and to resolve all our avocations into a heavenly discipline.
The gospel freely admitted makes a man happy. It gives him peace with God, and makes him happy in God. It gives to industry a noble, contented look which selfish drudgery never wore; and from the moment that a man begins to do his work for his Saviour's sake, he feels that the most ordinary employments are full of sweetness and dignity, and that the most difficult are not impossible. And if any of you, my friends, is weary with his work, if dissatisfaction with yourself or sorrow of any kind disheartens you, if at any time you feel the dull paralysis of conscious sin, or the depressing influence of vexing thoughts, look to Jesus, and be happy. Be happy, and your joyful work will prosper well.
Man must work. That is certain as the sun. But he may work grudgingly, or he may work gratefully; he may work as a man, or he may work as a machine. He cannot always choose his work, but he can do it in a generous temper, and with an up-looking heart. There is no work so rude, that he may not exalt it; there is no work so impassive, that he may not breathe a soul into it; there is no work so dull, that he may not enliven it.
No man is base who does a true work; for true action is the highest being. No man is miserable that does a true work; for right action is the highest happiness. No man is isolated that does a true work; for useful action is the highest harmony—it is the highest harmony with nature and with souls—it is living association with men and it is practical fellowship with God.
Labor is sweet, for Thou hast toiled,
And care is light, for Thou hast cared;
Let not our works with self be soiled,
Nor in unsimple ways ensnared.
Through life's long day and death's dark night,
O gentle Jesus! be our light.
A man's labors must pass like the sunrises and sunsets of the world. The next thing, not the last, must be his care.
Labor is a curse until communion with God in it, which is possible through Jesus Christ, makes it a blessing and a joy. Christ, in the sweat of His brow, won our salvation; and our work only becomes great when it is work done in, and for, and by Him.
LAST SUPPER.
Not worthy, Lord, to gather up the crumbs
With trembling hand that from Thy table fall,
A weary, heavy laden sinner comes
To plead Thy promise and obey Thy call.
We do not presume to come to this Thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in Thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under Thy table. But Thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of Thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink His blood, that our sinful souls and bodies may be made clean by His death, and washed through His most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in Him, and He in us.
We do not come to the Lord's Supper to testify thereby that we are perfect and righteous in ourselves; but on the contrary considering that we seek our life out of ourselves in Jesus Christ, we acknowledge that we lie in the midst of death. Therefore, notwithstanding we feel many infirmities and miseries in ourselves; as namely, that we have not perfect faith, and that we do not give ourselves to serve God with that zeal as we are bound, but have daily to strive with the weakness of our faith, and the evil lusts of our flesh; yet since we are by the grace of the Holy Ghost sorry for these weaknesses, and earnestly desirous to fight against our unbelief, and to live according to all the commandments of God; therefore we rest assured that no sin or infirmity, which still remaineth against our will in us, can hinder us from being received of God in mercy, and from being made worthy partakers of this heavenly meat and drink.
Dear Lord! while we adoring pay
Our humble thanks to Thee,
May every heart with rapture say,
"The Saviour died for me!"
This bread and wine are the simple but eloquent monument to the infinite love of the Son of God, around which we gather with tender, tearful gratitude, because He loved us so, and because we know that our garlands of affection and consecration are pleasing to Him.
Surely there is a fitness in the institution of the Lord's Supper as a standing memorial by which the church at large may commemorate the grandest act, and by which the heart of each individual believer may be reminded of his dearest friend. You, who have learned to love the Saviour, will prize His ordinance for the Saviour's sake. You who rejoice in the salvation purchased by His dying, will not fail with gratitude and faith to show the Lord's death until He come.
Love and grief our hearts dividing,
With our tears His feet we bathe;
Constant still, in faith abiding,
Life deriving from His death.
To turn one's back on the memorial supper is to disregard the most tender and loving and melting of all our Saviour's commandments. It is not needful to know just how obedience will help us. It is enough to know that it was His dying command that we keep it till He come.
Attendance at the Lord's table is not a subject left to human choice; but to every disciple of Jesus His express and solemn command is, "Do this."
Beloved, I congratulate you, that you are at the feast of redeeming love, that you know the riches of grace in Christ Jesus; but this is only the "early meal" (introductory feast); the "grand supper" is awaiting you, at the close of the day, in the palace of the King, where the fellowship will be perfect and eternal, where the table will be beyond all the mists and fogs of sin, where death never enters to disturb the festivities, and where we shall see the Lamb face to face. O! if the feast with Jesus here is so precious, what, what must heaven be!
Brethren, here in the sacrament is the rainbow of the new and better covenant, the renewed pledge of salvation purchased, and strength imparted, and blessing conferred on the believing soul. And now, as in your covenant you pay your vows—time, talent, influence, property, life, all God's,—He the Infinite, in boundless condescension stoops to whisper, "My light, my strength, my purity, my joy, my heaven, all yours." Thou hast avouched the Lord this day to be thy God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His statutes and His commandments, and His judgments, to hearken to His voice; and the Lord hath avouched thee this day to be His peculiar people, as He hath promised thee. And thus, brethren, in a mutual covenant of blessing, you do show forth His death until He come.
For they truly know their Lord in the breaking of bread, whose heart within them so vehemently burneth, whilst Thou, O blessed Jesus, dost walk and converse with them.
We, too, must enter into the Saviour's sorrow. For us, if we believe in Him, He breaks the bread, and pours the wine; and when we eat and drink, we do show the Lord's death until He come. His death, not His life, though that was lustrous with a holiness without the shadow of a stain. His death, not His teaching, though that embodied the fullness of a wisdom that was Divine. His death, not His miracles, though His course was a march of mercy, and in His track of blessing the world rejoiced and was glad. His death! His body not glorious, but broken; His blood, not coursing through the veins of a conqueror, but shed, poured out for man. His death! Still His death! Grandest and most consecrating memory both for earth and heaven!
We cannot embrace His cross, and yet refuse our own. We cannot raise the cup of His remembrance to our lips, without a secret pledge to Him, to one another, to the great company of the faithful in every age that we, too, hold ourselves at God's disposal, that we will ask nothing on our own account, that we will pass simply into the Divine hand to take us whither it will.
Christ has given us, not only the ritual of an ordinance, but the pattern for our lives, when He took the cup, and gave thanks. So common joys become sacraments, enjoyment becomes worship, and the cup which holds the bitter or the sweet skillfully mingled for our lives becomes the cup of blessing and salvation drank in remembrance of Him.
A heart-memory is better than a mere head-memory. Better to carry away a little of the love of Christ in our souls, than if we were able to repeat every word of every sermon we ever heard.
Your participation of the holy communion must be regarded as the fresh act of your espousals, as the solemn renewal of your covenant; as your surrender, entire and unhesitating, to the service of the Lord. It is thus that you confess Christ, and witness of Him to the world. If you eat and drink without discerning this great purpose, you eat and drink unworthily; if you repudiate such purpose, either in thought or act, you crucify in your measure the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame. By your profane use of the means of grace without the slightest desire for the grace of the means, it is as if you cut and wounded the Saviour in this the house of His friends, and sharpened the daggers of your treachery upon the tables of the violated law.
The Lord's Supper! the marriage supper of the Lamb! There are vacant seats around the table here. Will there be dear ones missed at the table there?
LAW.
Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world: all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempt from her power.
The law of God is not the conflict of will with will, but of wisdom with folly, knowledge with ignorance, right with wrong—the announcement out of parental love, of the conditions of spiritual life, happiness, immortality. The punishment of sin, therefore, may be contemplated, not as the overflowing of wrath, but the outworkings of natural law, coincident with the judgment of infinite righteousness.
Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.
Law, meaning obedience to a holy God, passes by a natural transition into the gospel; that is, reverential duty to a person, to the obedience of love at last, which obeys, because the beautifulness of obedience is perceived.
The law showed what man ought to be. Christ showed what man is, and what God is.
The law discovers the disease. The gospel gives the remedy.
The law is what we must do; the gospel what God will give.
The law sends us to Christ to be justified, and Christ sends us to the law to be regulated.
Though the moral law has ceased as a covenant, it remains as a rule of life. It will forever continue as the standard of holiness.
The moral law is to be viewed not only as the rule of our obedience, but also as the reason of it. We must not only do what is commanded, and avoid what is forbidden in the law; but we must also do good, for this very reason, that God requires it, and avoid evil, because He forbids it.
LEARNING OF CHRIST.
A man may call himself a Christian—but the measure of his Christianity is the occupation of his mind and heart with the truth as it is in Jesus.
In the school of Christ they are the best scholars who continue learning to the last.
We cannot be scholars of Christ without trying to understand what is the place and the work in the world for which each of us is fitted. Every thing which befalls us is part of our education. Every event and condition of life is a lesson which is to be turned to account to make us more worthy of Him who by suffering was made perfect—who Himself entered not into glory, till first He had suffered pain.
The disciples were not losing time when they sat beside their Master, and held quiet converse with Him under the olives of Bethany or by the shores of Galilee. Those were their school-hours; those were their feeding times.
Brethren, we can rule our tempers, and we ought. Open the gospel, that most profound philosophy of the human soul, and yet most simple and practical directory of human duty; study it, fill your whole nature with its inspiration; set Christ before you; look upon His calm forehead and unstormed breast; think how He endured all contradiction of sinners, and endured them to the cross; and on the cross learn of Him then, for He was meek and lowly of heart.
Only, stay by his side
Till the page is really known,
It may be we failed because we tried
To learn it all alone,
And now that He would not let us lose
One lesson of love
(For He knows the loss,)—can we refuse?
LIBERTY.
A day, an hour of virtuous liberty,
Is worth a whole eternity in bondage.
The first freedom is freedom from sin.
He is the freeman whom the truth makes free.
There are two freedoms—the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where a man is free to do what he ought.
It is a question not often considered, whether we are not just as independent when we choose an upright and godly course, even if our fathers did walk in it, as when we follow somebody's example in sin. Indeed the highest and truest independence is that which always elects to do right.
Conquer thyself. Till thou hast done that, thou art a slave; for it is almost as well to be in subjection to another's appetite as thine own.
The only rational liberty is that which is born of subjection, reared in the fear of God and the love of man, and made courageous in the defense of a trust and the prosecution of duty.
Do you wish to be free? Then above all things, love God, love your neighbor, love one another, love the common weal; then you will have true liberty.
This is the true liberty of Christ, when a free man binds himself in love to duty. Not in shrinking from our distasteful occupations, but in fulfilling them, do we realize our high origin.
The moment you accept God's ordering, that moment your work ceases to be a task, and becomes your calling; you pass from bondage to freedom, from the shadow-land of life Into life itself.
Not until right is founded upon reverence, will it be secure; not until duty is based upon love, will it be complete; not until liberty is based on eternal principles, will it be full, equal, lofty, and universal.
The great comprehensive truths, written on every page of our history, are these: Human happiness has no perfect security but freedom; freedom none but virtue; virtue none but knowledge; and neither freedom nor virtue has any vigor or immortal hope, except in the principles of the Christian faith, and in the sanctions of the Christian religion.
What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils, for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
That religion which holds that all men are equal in the sight of the great Father will not refuse to acknowledge that all citizens are equal in the sight of the law.
Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts—the cradle of its infancy, and the Divine source of its claims.
True liberty can exist only when justice is equally administered to all.
The Spirit of God first imparts love; He next inspires hope, and then gives liberty; and that is about the last thing we have in a good many of our churches at the present time.
O, we all long for the day, the blessed day, when freedom shall at least be co-extensive with Christendom; when a slave political or domestic, shall not tread on an atom upon which the cross of Calvary has cast its shadow; when the baptism of the crucified shall be on every brow, the seal of a heavenly sonship; when the fire of a new Pentecost shall melt asunder, by its divine heat of charity, the bond which wrong or prejudice has fastened; when, to touch any spot over the wide sweep of God's Christianized earth, any spot which the gospel of the Saviour has ever visited, which the name of the Saviour has ever sanctified, shall be, in itself, the spell of a complete deliverance, the magic of a perfect franchise.
Illustrious confessors of Jesus Christ, a Christian finds in prison the same joys as the prophets tasted in the desert. Call it not a dungeon, but a solitude. When the soul is in heaven, the body feels not the weight of fetters; it carries the whole man along with it.
LIFE.
Life as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence when it comes upon soundings.
Life is before you,—not earthly life alone, but life—a thread running interminably through the warp of eternity.
O thou child of many prayers!
Life hath quicksands, Life hath snares!
Care and age come unawares!
It is not possible to set out in the Christian profession with a more instructive or impressive idea than this—Life is the seed-time for eternity.
The grand question of life is, Is my name written in heaven?
The end of life is to be like unto God; and the soul following God, will be like unto Him.
Life is an outliving of world after world. Where is now what the world was to you at ten years old?
God help us! it is a foolish little thing, this human life, at the best; and it is half ridiculous and half pitiful to see what importance we ascribe to it, and to its little ornaments and distinctions.
The feeling of life's nothingness argues a mind capable of heavenly grandeur, and if capable, then made for it.
There is no life so humble that, if it be true and genuinely human and obedient to God, it may not hope to shed some of His light. There is no life so meager that the greatest and wisest of us can afford to despise it. We cannot know at what moment it may flash forth with the life of God.
Life is rather a state of embryo, a preparation for life; a man is not completely born till he has passed through death.
Brethren, it is the prismatic halo and ring of eternity round this poor glass of time that gives it all its dignity, all its meaning. The lives that are lived before God cannot be trifles.
As one climbs a mountain roadway, and looks off on the landscape through the forest trees or from some overtopping crag, at each step he sees more and more of the outlying beauty of field and lake and forest and hill and river, till he reaches the summit, where the whole vast scene opens to the view, and enthuses his soul with delight. So life should be a constant lookout, through the gray mists, through the falling shadows, through the running tears, till he comes to the shining top of life in God Himself, where the fogs lift, and the shadows fall, and the view is all undisturbed.
A picture without sky has no glory. This present, unless we see gleaming beyond it the eternal calm of the heavens, above the tossing tree tops with withering leaves, and the smoky chimneys, is a poor thing for our eyes to gaze at, or our hearts to love, or our hands to toil on.
Life is great if properly viewed in any aspect; it is mainly great when viewed in connection with the world to come.
There is no human life so poor and small as not to hold many a divine possibility.
Life and religion are one, or neither is any thing.
Let the current of your being set towards God, then your life will be filled and calmed by one master-passion which unites and stills the soul.
Man's life is so interwoven with the grand life of his Maker that it admits of no adequate or rational interpretation except when the Creator as Supreme and the creatures of His hand as subordinate, are seen working in unison.
I believe that we cannot live better than in seeking to become better.
Making their lives a prayer.
While we seek to fill up life in a way that will best secure the ends of our existence here, our whole plan and course of action should be such as will not hinder but serve our preparation for a future world.
Pray for and work for fullness of life above every thing; full red blood in the body; full honesty and truth in the mind; and the fullness of a grateful love for the Saviour in your heart.
I find death perfectly desirable; but I find life perfectly beautiful.
Every day that is born into the world comes likes a burst of music, and rings itself all the way through; and thou shalt make of it a dance, a dirge, or a grand life-march as thou wilt.
Act as if you expected to live a hundred years, but might die to-morrow.
Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou livest,
Live well; how long, or short, permit to Heaven.
We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
I would not choose to go where I would be afraid to die, nor could I bear to live without a good hope for hereafter.
Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment uncertain, and judgment difficult.
A few years hence and he will be beneath the sod; but those cliffs will stand, as now, facing the ocean, incessantly lashed by its waves, yet unshaken, immovable; and other eyes will gaze on them for their brief day of life, and then they, too, will close.
They waste life in what are called good resolutions—partial efforts at reformation, feebly commenced, heartlessly conducted, and hopelessly concluded.
It is infamy to die, and not be missed.
And thus does life go on, until death accomplishes the catastrophe in silence, takes the worn frame within his hand, and, as if it were a dried-up scroll, crumbles it in his grasp to ashes. The monuments of kingdoms, too, shall disappear. Still the globe shall move; still the stars shall burn; still the sun shall paint its colors on the day, and its colors on the year. What, then, is the individual, or what even is the race in the sublime recurrings of Time? Years, centuries, cycles, are nothing to these. The sun that measures out the ages of our planet is not a second-hand on the great dial of the universe.
Oh, I believe that there is no away; that no love, no life, goes ever from us; it goes as He went, that it may come again, deeper and closer and surer, and be with us always, even to the end of the world.
The highest life is a broken column; the fairest life, a tarnished gem; the richest life, an unripened fruit.
This earth will be looked back on like a lowly home, and this life of ours be remembered like a short apprenticeship to duty.
This is life's greatest moment, when the soul unfolds capacities which reach beyond earth's boundaries.
Life! we've been long together
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear,—
Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear.
Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time,
Say not "Good-night," but in some brighter clime,
Bid me "Good-morning."
LITERATURE.
A beautiful literature springs from the depth and fullness of intellectual and moral life, from an energy of thought and feeling, to which nothing, as we believe, ministers so largely as enlightened religion.
God be thanked for books! they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levelers. They give to all who will faithfully use them the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race.
From the hour of the invention of printing, books, and not kings, were to rule the world. Weapons forged in the mind, keen-edged, and brighter than a sunbeam, were to supplant the sword and battle-axe. Books! lighthouses built on the sea of time! Books! by whose sorcery the whole pageantry of the world's history moves in solemn procession before our eyes. From their pages great souls look down in all their grandeur, undimmed by the faults and follies of earthly existence, consecrated by time.
Be less concerned about the number of books you read, and more about the good use you make of them. The best of books is the Bible.
The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.
Thou mayest as well expect to grow stronger by always eating, as wiser by always reading.
It is right for you, young men, to enrich yourselves with the spoils of all pure literature; but he who would make a favorite of a bad book, simply because it contains a few beautiful passages, might as well caress the hand of an assassin because of the jewelry which sparkles on his fingers.
LITTLE THINGS.
Love's secret is to be always doing things for God, and not to mind because they are such little ones.
At Toulon, Napoleon, looking out of the batteries, drew back a step to let some one take his place. The next moment the new arrived was killed. That step brought the French Empire, and made possible the bloody roll of its victories and defeats. The rout at Waterloo turned on a shower of rain hindering Grouchy's advance. The resolution of a moment, with some men, has been the turning-point of infinite issues to a world.
One of the best things in the gospel of Jesus is the stress it lays on small things. It ascribes more value to quality than to quantity; it teaches that God does not ask how much we do, but how we do it.
Let us be content to do little, if God sets us at little tasks. It is but pride and self-will which says, "Give me something huge to fight,—and I should enjoy that—but why make me sweep the dust?"
Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.
The reason why those who are converted to Christ often make so poor a work of rectifying their old habits, is that they lay down their work in the very places where it needs to be prosecuted most carefully, that is, in their common employments. They do not live to God in that which is least.
All the mischiefs which befall Christian character, and destroy its growth, are such as lie in the ordinary humble duties of life.
Let us try always to feel that in the commonest things we may hear the command of God, that the trifles of each day—trifles though they be—vibrate and sound with the reverberation of His great voice.
The best things are nearest; light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life.
For honesty is before honor; and though man must write his poems in sounding words, God's poems are printed best in the brave and silent duties of common life.
We are to work after no set fashion of high endeavor; but to walk with Jesus, performing, as it were, a ministry on foot, that we may stop at the humblest matter, and prove our fidelity there.
There are no trifles in the moral universe of God. Speak me a word to-day;—it shall go ringing on through the ages.
My brother, life is all great. Life is great because it is the aggregation of littles. As the chalk cliffs that rear themselves hundreds of feet above the crawling sea beneath, are all made up of the minute skeletons of microscopic animalculæ; so life, mighty and awful as having eternal consequences, life that towers beetling over the sea of eternity, is made up of these minute incidents, of these trifling duties, of these small tasks; and if thou art not "faithful in that which is least," thou art unfaithful in the whole.
God, who prepares His work for the ages, accomplishes it by the feeblest instruments. It is the method of His providence to produce great results from inconsiderable means. The law which prevades the kingdom of nature is discerned in the history of mankind. Truth makes silent progress, like the water that trickles behind the rocks, and loosens them from the mountain on which they rest. Suddenly the hidden operation is revealed, and a single day suffices to lay bare the work of years, if not of ages.
Duty is duty, conscience is conscience, right is right, and wrong is wrong, whatever sized type they may be printed in. "Large" or "small" are not words for the vocabulary of conscience.
LONGING FOR GOD.
If we would gain light either on the theory or the practice of religion: 1. We must sincerely desire the light. 2. We must use the light we already have. 3. We must patiently seek light in the double way of prayer and rational inquiry. Never, as long as the world stands, will any religiously benighted soul thus patiently desire and pray and labor for the break of day, without at last seeing the eyelids of the morn unsealed, and the painfully dusky east gradually redden into the sun.
That soul is on the certain path toward light which, sincerely desiring the light, constantly submits to the claims of the light as they are made known. That soul cannot stay in darkness, any more than a flower opening its petals broadly to the sun can stay in shadow.
There is no long interval between the sense of thirst and the trickling of the stream over the parched lip; but ever it is flowing, flowing past us, and the desire is but the opening of the lips to receive the limpid, and life-giving waters. No one ever desired the grace of God, really and truly desired it, but just in proportion as he desired it, he got it; just in proportion as he thirsted, he was satisfied.
The soul that rightly receives Christ is in a longing condition; never did the hart pant for the water brooks, never did the hireling desire the shadow, never did a condemned person long for a pardon more than the soul longs for Christ.
A living man must have a living God, or his soul will perish in the midst of earthly plenty, and will thirst and die whilst the water of earthly delights is running all around him. We are made to need persons not things.
Our yearnings are homesicknesses for heaven; our sighings are for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, know not that they sob for their parents. The soul's inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, and having no one to tell them what it is that ails them.
Come! for I need Thy love,
More than the flower the dew, or grass the rain;
Come like Thy Holy Dove,
And let me in Thy sight rejoice to live again.
LOOKING TO JESUS.
My friends, look to Christ, and not to yourselves. That is what is the matter with a great many sinners; instead of looking to Christ, they are looking at the bite of sin.
Those who are weak in grace dwell more upon their sins than upon the Saviour; more upon their misery than upon free grace and mercy; more upon that which may feed their fears than upon that which may strengthen their faith; more upon the cross than the crown.
One of Satan's devices to keep poor souls in a sad, doubting, and questioning condition is causing them to be always posing and musing upon sin; to mind their sins more than their Saviour: yea, so to mind their sins as to forget and neglect their Saviour. Their eyes are so fixed upon their disease that they cannot see their remedy, though it be near; and they do so muse upon their debts that they have neither mind nor heart to think of their surety.
How can we in practice copy Jesus? How do you write a copy in your copy-book? By constantly looking at the top line, imitating its capital letters, small letters, up-strokes, downstrokes, even stops. So be always "looking unto Jesus."
Alas! alas! for the coldness, the vagrancy, and the infrequency of the thoughts which we offer to Him who ever thinks of us, and whom it is our life to know and keep in our hearts. Alas! alas! for the satire on Christian life, as we often see it, which that exhortation and its accompanying motives contain, "Holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling—consider—Christ Jesus."
LOVE.
Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.
It is love that asks, that seeks, that knocks, that finds, and that is faithful to what it finds.
Love is the greatest thing that God can give us, for Himself is love; and it is the greatest thing we can give to God, for it will also give ourselves, and carry with it all that is ours.
Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.
Love is a passion
Which kindles honor into noble acts.
Joy is love exulting; peace is love in repose; long-suffering is love on trial; gentleness is love in society; goodness is love in action; faith is love on the battle-field; meekness is love at school; and temperance is love in training.
Humble love,
And not proud reason, keeps the door of heaven;
Love finds admission, where proud science fails.
Of all earthly music that which reaches farthest into heaven is the music of a loving heart.
Love reflects the thing beloved.
Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.
Heaven's harmony is universal love.
Of the systems above us, angelic and seraphic, we know little; but we see one law, simple, efficient, and comprehensive as that of gravitation,—the law of love,—extending its sway over the whole of God's dominions, living where He lives, embracing every moral movement in its universal authority, and producing the same harmony, where it is obeyed as we observe in the movements of nature.
The love that gushes for all is the real elixir of life—the fountain of bodily longevity. It is the lack of this that always produces the feeling of age.
God be thanked that there are some in the world to whose hearts the barnacles will not cling.
The incarnation of God in Christ reveals this truth, that the love that seeks and saves the lost is a love that suffers. On the one side there is loss, Gethsemane and the rugged burden of Golgotha, but on the other is gain, the gain of a world's redemption.
If there is any thing that keeps the mind open to angel visits, and repels the ministry of ill, it is human love.
Love would master self; and having made the mastery stretch onward and upward toward infinitude.
Learn the new commandment of the Son of God. Not to love merely, but to love as He loved. Go forth in this spirit to your life-duties; go forth,—children of the cross, to carry every thing before you, and win victories for God by the conquering power of a love like His.
Ah, how skillful grows the hand
That obeyeth Love's command!
It is the heart, and not the brain,
That to the highest doth attain,
And he who followeth Love's behest
Far excelleth all the rest!
The most beautiful sight this earth affords is a man or woman so filled with love that duty is only a name, and its performance the natural outflow and expression of the love which has become the central principle of their life.
Be loving, and you will never want for love; be humble, and you will never want for guiding.
I have often had occasion to observe, that a warm blundering man does more for the world than a frigid wise man.
LOVE TO CHRIST AND GOD.
Saviour! teach me, day by day,
Love's sweet lesson to obey;
Sweeter lesson cannot be,
Loving Him who first loved me.
Charity is the very livery of Christ.
Love is a golden key to let in Christ, and a strong lock to keep out others.
Divine love is a sacred flower, which in its early bud is happiness, and in its full bloom is heaven.
Christ is not valued at all unless He be valued above all.
The true measure of loving God is to love Him without measure.
Between God and man, between the gospel and each soul, the interpreter is Love.
God is all love, and the more we are like Him the more we shall love; the trouble is not in the quantity but the quality of our love. If it were wholly pure, wholly unselfish, it could not be too deep or intense; for all true loving lifts us to a higher plane, bringing us nearer to God and the eternal good.
To be like Christ in His love is far more than to be like Him in His knowlege, if we were forced to choose between them; but they harmonize and strengthen each other; more knowledge will help us to love more; and more love help us to know more.
Love is the active, working principle in all true faith. It is its very soul, without which it is dead. "Faith works by love."
But how shall this love be demonstrated? After what method shall it be expressed? Not by secret musings alone; not by the chanting of religious sonnets alone; not by grateful remembrances of Him—at His table only—but by deeds of love towards those who in a real sense represent Him, because partakers of that nature, our common humanity, which He condescended to assume.
Consider that as a principle of love is the main principle in the heart of a real Christian, so the labor of love, is the main business of the Christian life.
True love goes ever straight forward, not in its own strength, but esteeming itself as nothing. Then indeed we are truly happy. The cross is no longer a cross when there is no self to suffer under it.
A mightier love for the Son of God, to overpower and subdue and lead captive these wayward and truant affections of the natural heart—this is what is needed.
All true love to God is preceded in the heart by these two things—a sense of sin, and an assurance of pardon. There is no love possible—real, deep, genuine, worthy of being called love of God—which does not start with the belief of my own transgression, and with the thankful reception of forgiveness in Christ.
The disciple whom Jesus loved leaned on His bosom. Dear friend, where are you?
Her heart was a passion-flower, bearing within it the crown of thorns and the cross of Christ.
Dear Saviour! we are Thine,
By everlasting bands;
Our hearts, our souls, we would resign
Entirely to Thy hands.
Love Christ, and then the eternity in the heart will not be a great aching void, but will be filled with the everlasting life which Christ gives and is.
Give me a baptism of glowing love,
Thy power and presence wheresoe'er I rove;
And my last prayer, all other prayers above
Oh, give to me
More of Thyself, Lord Jesus: more of Thee!
Lord, thou knowest all things; Thou knowest that I love Thee!
Let us learn how the love of Christ, received into the heart, triumphs gradually but surely over all sin, transforms character, turning even its weakness into strength, and so, from the depths of transgression and the very gates of hell, raises men to God.
Prostrate, see Thy cross I grasp,
And Thy pierced feet I clasp;
Gracious Jesus, spurn me not;
On me, with compassion fraught,
Let Thy glances fall.
From Thy cross of agony,
My Beloved, look on me;
Turn me wholly unto Thee;
"Be thou whole," say openly:
"I forgive thee all."
Christ is not sweet till sin be made bitter to us.
Lovest thou me? This is the one test question of our religion—for he that loveth is born of God.
Jesus, Master, I am Thine;
Keep me faithful, keep me near;
Let Thy presence in me shine
All my homeward way to cheer.
Jesus, at Thy feet I fall,
Oh, be Thou my All in All.
No man loveth God except the man who has first learned that God loves him.
For they the mind of Christ discern
Who lean, like John, upon His breast.
How shall we test our love?
How shall the real be known
From that which takes its form?
Love "seeketh not her own."
None know how to prize the Saviour, but such as are zealous in pious works for others.
Earthly joy can take but a bat-like flight, always checked, always limited, in dusk and darkness. But the love of Christ breaks through the vaulting, and leads us up into the free sky above, expanding to the very throne of Jehovah, and drawing us still upward to the infinite heights of glory.
Fade, fade, each earthly joy;
Jesus is mine!
Break every earthly tie;
Jesus is mine;
Dark is the wilderness;
Earth has no resting-place;
Jesus alone can bless;
Jesus is mine.
Pure love is in the will alone; it is no sentimental love, for the imagination has no part in it; it loves, if we may so express it, without feeling, as faith believes without seeing.
Love is the foundation of all obedience. Without it morality degenerates into mere casuistry. Love is the foundation of all knowledge. Without it religion degenerates into a chattering about Moses and doctrines and theories; a thing that will neither kill nor make alive, that never gave life to a single soul or blessing to a single heart, and never put strength into any hand in the conflict and strife of daily life.
Mourning after an absent God is an evidence of a love as strong, as rejoicing in a present one.
To love God, we must know Him as manifested in Christ,—know Him as incarnated in human form,—know Him as revealing His holiness, His tenderness, His pity, His yearning love, and condescending grace, in the suffering, glorified Redeemer.
Oh! make me Thine forever;
And should I fainting be,
Lord! let me never, never,
Outlive my love to Thee!
When a man is told that the whole of religion and morality is summed up in the two commandments, to love God, and to love our neighbor, he is ready to cry, like Charoba in Gebir, at the first sight of the sea, "Is this the mighty ocean? is this all?" Yes, all; but how small a part of it do your eyes survey! Only trust yourself to it; launch out upon it; sail abroad over it; you will find it has no end; it will carry you round the world.
Apart from the positive woes of perdition, an eternity of wretchedness grows from the want of love to Christ as naturally as the oak grows from the acorn, or the harvest from the scattered grain. It is not that love to Christ merits heaven; it does far better, it makes heaven. It is, as it were, the organ of sensation that takes note of heaven's blessedness.
Nothing satisfies God but the voluntary sacrifice of love. The pain of Christ gave God no pleasure—only the love that was tested by pain—the love of perfect obedience.
How shall I do to love? Believe. How shall I do to believe? Love.