22 quotes
The ground of all religion, that which makes it possible, is the relation in which the human soul stands to God.
Culture and Religion (1870)
Not as men of science, not as critics, not as philosophers, but as little children, shall we enter into the kingdom of heaven.
Culture and Religion (1870)
For with all our pretension to enlightenment, are we not now a talking, desultory, rather than a meditative generation?
Culture and Religion (1870)
Believe in God, and bid all knowledge speed. Sooner or later the full harmony will reveal itself, the discords and contradictions disappear.
Culture and Religion (1870)
Beauty comes, we scarce know how, as an emanation from sources deeper than itself.
Beauty comes, we know not how, as an emanation from sources deeper than itself.
They who seek religion for culture-sake are æsthetic, not religious, and will never gain that grace which religion adds to culture, because they never can have the religion.
Culture and Religion (1870)
They who seek religion for culture's sake are aesthetic, not religious, and will never gain that grace which religion adds to culture, because they never can have the religion.
Culture and Religion (1870)
Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimate of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness.
Subtlest thought shall fail, and learning falter,
Churches change, forms perish, systems go,
But our human needs, they will not alter,
Christ no after age shall e'er outgrow.
Glen Desseray and Other Poems (1888)
But now I think the belief in a Divine education, open to each man and to all men, takes up into itself all that is true in the end proposed by culture, supplements, and perfects it.
Culture and Religion (1870)
Hidden from others do we know ourselves?
Albeit the surface takes the common light;
Who hath not felt that this our being shelves
Down to abysses, dark and infinite?
Glen Desseray and Other Poems (1888)
Criticism is not religion, and by no process can it be substituted for it. It is not the critic's eye but the child's heart that most truly discerns the countenance that looks out from the pages of the Gospel.
Culture and Religion (1870)
That image, or rather that Person, so human, yet so entirely divine, has a power to fill the imagination, to arrest the affections, to deepen and purify the conscience, which nothing else in the world has.
Culture and Religion (1870)
So some small consciousness doth play
On the surface of our being, but the broad
And permanent foundations every way
Pass into mystery, are hid in God.
Glen Desseray and Other Poems (1888)
So full of power, yet blithe and debonair,
Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay,
Or half a-dream chaunting with jaunty air
Great words of Goethe, catch of Béranger.
Glen Desseray and Other Poems (1888)
From old foundations where the nation rears
Her darlings, came that flower of England's youth
And here in latest teens, or riper years,
Stood drinking in all nobleness and truth.
Glen Desseray and Other Poems (1888)
There is perhaps no truer sign that a man is really advancing than that he is learning to forget himself, that he is losing the natural thoughts about self in the thought of One higher than himself, to whose guidance he can commit himself and all men.
Culture and Religion (1870)
[T]he belief in a Divine education open to each man and to all men, takes up into itself all that is true in the end proposed by Culture, supplements and perfects it.
Culture and Religion (1870)
The sense that a man is serving a Higher than himself, with a service which will become ever more and more perfect freedom, evokes more profound, more humbling, more exalted emotions than any thing else in the world can do. The spirit of man is an instrument which cannot give out its deepest, finest tones, except under the immediate hand of the Divine Harmonist.
Culture and Religion (1870)