Henry Parry Liddon Quotes - Page 2

No light privilege is it to have a hand in building up the moral life of these new communities; no common honour surely to help to lay side by side with the foundations of their free political institutions the broad and deep foundations of the Church of God.

If a religious principle is worth anything, it applies to a million of human beings as truly as to one; and the difficulty of insisting on its wider application does not furnish any proof that it ought not to be so applied.

The great laws of the moral world do not vary, however different, under different dispensations, may be the authoritative enunciation of truth, or the means of propagating and defending it.

Certainly, envy is no monopoly of the poor; it makes itself felt in all sections of society; it haunts the court, the library, the barrack-room, even the sanctuary; it is provoked in some unhappy souls by the near neighbourhood of any superior rank or excellence whatever.

But wherever we labour, the rule and the profession of the Apostle must be ours; and whatever be our personal mistakes and failures, God grant that our consciences may never accuse us of being ashamed of the Gospel of Christ.

We may rightly shrink from saying that any given individual is certainly so unfaithful to light and grace as to incur the eternal loss of God, we do know that many are so. God knows who they are.

The truth is I suppose that a tour lays in a great stock of thought and spirits for the future; the fatigue and drawbacks of actual travelling are forgotten and a bright residuum remains.

Prayer is the act by which man, detaching himself from the embarrassments of sense and nature, ascends to the true level of his destiny.

It is only Jesus Christ who has thrown light on life and immortality through the gospel; and because He has done so, and has enabled us by His atoning death and intercession to make the most of this discovery, His gospel is, for all who will, a power of God unto salvation.

Augustine of Hippo used to say that, but for God's grace, he should have been capable of committing any crime; and it is when we feel this sincerely, that we are most likely to be really improving, and best able to give assistance to others without moral loss to ourselves.

We cannot think that God frightens us with threatenings which He really does not mean to carry out, without doing Himself obvious dishonour.

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.

What we do on some great occasion will probably depend on what we already are; and what we are will be the result of previous years of self-discipline.

Let us think today of the prospect of sharing in a sublime and blessed existence such as is portrayed in the text of the Apocalypse before us, and let us ask ourselves whether it should or should not make any difference in our present state of being.

The real difficulty with thousands in the present day is not that Christianity has been found wanting, but that it has never been seriously tried.

Often enough it is little that can be done in an old country, where life is ruled by fixed and imperious traditions; while much may be done where all is yet fluid, and where, if religion is sometimes unprotected and unrecognised, she is not embarrassed by influences which deaden or cramp her best energies at home.

A Christ upon paper, though it were the sacred pages of the Gospel, would have been as powerless to save Christendom as a Christ in fresco; not less feeble than the Countenance which, in the last stages of its decay, may be traced on the wall of the Refectory at Milan. A living Christ is the key to the phenomenon of Christian history.

Liberalism itself, is, on all matters connected with Church and Education, only a kind of corporate and "respectable" ungodliness.

As all true virtue, wherever found, is a ray of the life of the All-Holy; so all solid knowledge, all really accurate thought, descends from the Eternal Reason, and ought, when we apprehend it, to guide us upwards to Him.

I get some very fierce anonymous letters about the Athanasian Creed, which would amuse you, if they were not so sad as to what they imply on the part of the writers. The last tells me that I am a Pharisee, and should have helped to crucify our Lord. It is very odd that people should think, much more write, such things; but the passion of unbelief is a very serious thing while it lasts.