Horace Bushnell Quotes - Page 2

Education is only second to nature.

Nature has no promise for society, least of all, any remedy for sin.

Jesus is the true manifestation of God, and He is manifested to be the regenerating power of a divine life.

Every man's life is a plan of God.

We shall never recover the true apostolic energy, and be endued with power from on high, as the first disciples were, 'till we recover the lost faith.

Guilt is the very nerve of sorrow.

It doth not yet appear what we shall be. We lie here in our nest, unfledged and weak, guessing dimly at our future, and scarce believing what even now appears. But the power is in us, and that power is finally to be revealed. And what a revelation will that be!

A house without a roof would scarcely be a more different home, than a family unsheltered by God's friendship, and the sense of being always rested in His providential care and guidance.

There never has been a great and beautiful character, which has not become so by filling well the ordinary and smaller offices appointed of God.

Christianity is not so much the advent of a better doctrine as of a perfect character.

O, if we could tear aside the vail, and see for but one hour what it signifies to be a soul in the power of an endless life, what a revelation would it be!

Christ wants to lead men by their love, their personal love to Him, and the confidence of His personal love to them.

Christ commands you to take up His cross and follow Him, not that He may humble you, or lay some penance upon you, but that you may surrender the low self-will and the feeble pride of your sin, and ascend into the sublime patience of heavenly charity.

Christ does not dress up a moral picture, and ask you to observe its beauty. He only tells you how to live; and the most beautiful characters the world has ever seen, have been those who received and lived these precepts without once conceiving their beauty.

We come, in our trust, unto God, and the moment we so embrace Him, by committing our total being and eternity to Him, we find every thing is transformed. There is life in us from God; a kind of Christ-consciousness is opened in us, testifying with the apostle,--Christ liveth in me.

However dark our lot may be, there is light enough on the other side of the cloud, in that pure empyrean where God dwells, to irradiate every darkness of this world; light enough to clear every difficult question, remove every ground of obscurity, conquer every atheistic suspicion, silence every hard judgment, light enough to satisfy, nay, to ravish the mind forever.

As long as we abide in Christ, our action is from Him, not from our own corrupt and broken nature.

Faith is the act of trust by which one being, a sinner, commits himself to another being, a Saviour.

It is the grand endeavor of the gospel to communicate God to men.

We are to work after no set fashion of high endeavor; but to walk with Jesus, performing, as it were, a ministry on foot, that we may stop at the humblest matter, and prove our fidelity there.

When has the world seen a phenomenon like this? a lonely uninstructed youth, coming from amid the moral darkness of Galilee, even more distinct from His age, and from every thing around Him, than a Plato would be rising up in some wild tribe in Oregon, assuming thus a position at the head of the world and maintaining it, for eighteen centuries, by the pure self-evidence of His life and doctrine.

It is only Christianity, the great bond of love and duty to God, that makes any existence valuable or even tolerable.

Christ's sacrifice stands in glorious proportions with the work to be done. Nothing else or less would suffice. It is a work supernatural, transacted in the plane of nature; and what but such a work could restore the broken order of the soul under evil?

Not all the winds, and storms, and earthquakes, and seas, and seasons of the world, have done so much to revolutionize the earth as Man, the power of an endless life, has done since the day he came forth upon it, and received dominion over it.

O, if there be any kind of life most sad, and deepest in the scale of pity, it is the dry, cold impotence of one, who has honestly set to the work of his own self-redemption.