14 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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
The main condition is that the spiritual ear should be open to overhear and patiently take in, and the will ready to obey that testimony which, I believe, God bears in every human heart, however dull, to those great truths which the Bible reveals. This, and not logic, is the way to grow in religious knowledge, to know that the truths of religion are not shadows, but deep realities.
Culture and Religion (1870)
We are not called on to believe this or that doctrine which may be proposed to us till we can do so from honest conviction. But we are called on to trust—to trust ourselves to God, being sure that He will lead us right—to keep close to Him—and to trust the promises which He whispers through our conscience; this we can do, and we ought to do.
Culture and Religion (1870)