Faith, Spirituality and Religion

The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.

It is well that the stately synagogue should lift its walls by the side of the aspiring cathedral, a perpetual reminder that there are many mansions in Father’s earthly house as well as in the heavenly ones.

Under all that we think, lives all we believe, like the ultimate veil of our spirits.

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens. J. R. R.

Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.

 

Spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

I . . . once read the Old Testament and the four Gospels straight through, from a vainglorious desire to do what nobody else had done.

‘God bless us every one!’ said Tiny Tim.

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees.

This is the month, and this the happy morn, Wherein the Son of Heav’n’s eternal King, Of wedded maid and virgin mother born, Our great redemption from above did bring; For so the holy sages once did sing, That He our deadly forfeit should release, And with His Father work us a perpetual peace.

I hold it true, whate’er befall;

 

While the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.

 

Either this man [Jesus] was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

 

To arrive at the truth in all things, we ought always to be ready to believe that what seems to us white is black if the hierarchical Church so defines it.

 

Preach the gospel all the time—if necessary, use words.

 

I am known in parts of the world by people who have never heard of Jesus Christ.

 

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don’t make it of wood, you must make it of words.

Earth reserves no blessing / For the unblessed of Heaven!

The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

Beware of the community in which blasphemy does not exist: underneath, atheism runs rampant.

Intuition attracts those who wish to be spiritual without any bother, because it promises a heaven where the intuitions of others can be ignored.

We are always making God our accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.