Henry Parry Liddon Quotes

Nothing is really lost by a life of sacrifice; everything is lost by failure to obey God's call.

How do I know that there is a God? In the same way that I know, on looking at the sand, when a man or beast has crossed the desert - by His footprints in the world around me.

The life of man is made up of action and endurance; the life is fruitful in the ratio in which it is laid out in noble action or in patient perseverance.

As a man passes into middle life, or beyond it, autumn, it has been said, whispers more to his soul than any other season of the natural year. It is not difficult to see why this should be.

The Church of the Apostles was a Church of the poor; of silver and gold it had none.

Worship is the earthly act by which we most distinctly recognize our personal immortality; men who think that they will be extinct a few years hence do not pray. In worship we spread out our insignificant life, which yet is the work of the Creator's hands, and the purchase of the Redeemer's blood, before the Eternal and All-Merciful, that we may learn the manners of a higher sphere, and fit ourselves for companionship with saints and angels, and for the everlasting sight of the face of God.

Worship is the common sense of faith in a life to come; and the hours we devote to it will assuredly be among those upon which we shall reflect with most thankful joy when all things here shall have fallen into a very distant background, and when through the Atoning Mercy our true home has been reached at last.

Truth has her sterner responsibilities sooner or later in store for those who have known anything about her.

The resurrection asserts a truth which is by no means always written legibly for all men on the face of nature. It tells us that the spiritual is higher than the material; that in this universe spirit counts for more than matter.

Practically speaking, there are for each one of us two supreme realities -- God and the soul. The heavens and the earth will pass away. But the soul will still remain, face to face with God.

Again and again the Church of Christ has been all but engulfed, as men might have deemed, in the billows; again and again the storm has been calmed by the Master, Who had seemed for awhile to sleep.

If Christianity has really come from heaven, it must renew the whole life of man; it must govern the life of nations no less than that of individuals; it must control a Christian when acting in his public and political capacity as completely as when he is engaged in the duties which belong to him as a member of a family circle.

No Legislature can really destroy a religious conviction, except by exterminating its holders. It is historically too late to do that, and we shall live to see the drowned Egyptians on the seashore even yet.

If we might reverently imagine ourselves scheming beforehand what kind of book the Book of God ought to be, how different would it be from the actual Bible! There would be as many Bibles as there are souls, and they would differ as widely. But in one thing, amid all their differences, they would probably agree: they would lack the variety, both in form and substance, of the Holy Book which the Church of God places in the hands of her children.

If man looks within himself he must perceive two things: a law of right, and that which it condemns.

So long as men die, life will reassert its tragic interest from time to time with fresh energy, and to this interest Christianity alone can respond. If the scientific people could rid us of death, they might indeed hope to win over the heart and conscience of the world, permanently, to some form of non-theistic speculation. As it is, the tide ebbs, as I believe, only that it may flow again.

It is some disaster for any mind to hold any one thing for truth that is untrue, however insignificant it be, or however honestly it be held. It is a greater disaster when the false prejudice bars the way to some truth behind it, which, but for it, would find an entrance to the soul; and the greatness of the disaster will in this case be measured by the importance of the excluded truth.

When the fields of human knowledge are so various and so vast as is the case in our day, the utmost that can be done by single minds not of encyclopedic range, is to master one subject or branch of subject as thoroughly as possible, and to rest content with knowing that others are working in regions where neither time nor strength will permit us to enter.

Useful knowledge, practical kindness, and beneficent laws -- these are not the Gospel; but, like philosophy, they are, or may be, its handmaids. They may make its task smooth and grateful; they may associate themselves with its victories, or they may prepare its way.

The history of the Church of Christ from the days of the Apostles has been a history of spiritual movements.

Poverty ... is already half-Christian by its very nature; it has everything to gain by a doctrine which makes so little of the present and the visible, and so much of the future and the unseen.

A deliberate rejection of duty prescribed by already recognized truth cannot but destroy, or at least impair most seriously the clearness of our mental vision.

Look to the end; and resolve to make the service of Christ the first object in what remains of life, without indifference to the opinion of your fellow men, but also without fear of it.

Cats are like oysters, in that no one is neutral about them; everyone is, explicitly or implicitly, friendly or hostile to them. And they are like children in their power of discovering, by a rapid and sure instinct, who likes them and who does not. It is difficult to win their affection; and it is easy to forfeit what is hard to win. But when given, their love, although less demonstrative, is more delicate and beautiful than that of a dog.

The purely material world seems to have more in common than we with the unchanging and everlasting years of the Great Creator. Yet we know that it is not so. In reality the rocks are less enduring than man. Each man's personal self will still survive for weal or woe, when another catastrophe shall have utterly changed the surface of this planet, and the elements shall have melted with fervent heat, and the earth also and all things that are therein shall have been burnt up.