Don't imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call "humble" nowadays: he read more

Don't imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call "humble" nowadays: he won't be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who's always telling you that, of course, he's nobody. Probably all you'll think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him, it will be because you feel a bit envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He won't be thinking about himself at all. There I must stop. If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you're not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

Feast of Edward the Confessor, 1066 If every call to Christ and His righteousness is a call to suffering, read more

Feast of Edward the Confessor, 1066 If every call to Christ and His righteousness is a call to suffering, the converse is equally -- every call to suffering is a call to Christ, a promotion, an invitation to come up higher.

God is not a deceiver, that he should offer to support us, and then, when we lean upon Him, should read more

God is not a deceiver, that he should offer to support us, and then, when we lean upon Him, should slip away from us.

I believe that pure thinking will do more to educate a man than any other activity he can engage in. read more

I believe that pure thinking will do more to educate a man than any other activity he can engage in. To afford sympathetic entertainment to abstract ideas, to let one idea beget another, and that another, till the mind teems with them; to compare one idea with others, to weigh, to consider, evaluate, approve, respect, correct, refine; to join thought with thought like an architect till a whole edifice has been created within the mind; to travel back in imagination to the beginning of the creation and then to leap swiftly forward to the end of time; to bound upward through illimitable space and downward into the nucleus of an atom; and all this without so much as moving from our chair or opening the eyes--this is to soar above all the lower creation and come near to the angels of God.

Whomever the Lord has adopted and deemed worthy of his fellowship ought to prepare themselves for a hard, toilsome, and read more

Whomever the Lord has adopted and deemed worthy of his fellowship ought to prepare themselves for a hard, toilsome, and unquiet life, crammed with very many and various kinds of evil. It is the Heavenly Father's will thus to exercise them so as to put his own children to a definite test. Beginning with Christ, his first-born, he follows this plan with all his children.

Funds are low again, hallelujah! That means God trusts us and is willing to leave His reputation in our hands.

Funds are low again, hallelujah! That means God trusts us and is willing to leave His reputation in our hands.

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world

Commemoration of Brooke Foss Westcott, Bishop of Durham, Teacher, 1901 Nor is the fact that a particular form read more

Commemoration of Brooke Foss Westcott, Bishop of Durham, Teacher, 1901 Nor is the fact that a particular form was good in a particular age any proof that it is also good for another age. The history of the organization of Christianity has been in reality the history of successive readjustments of form to altered circumstances. Its power of readjustment has been at once a mark of its divinity and a secret of its strength.

[Thomas] Carlyle believed that every man has a special duty to do in this world. If he had been asked read more

[Thomas] Carlyle believed that every man has a special duty to do in this world. If he had been asked what especially he conceived his own duty to be, he would have said that it was to force men to realize once more that the world was actually governed by a just God; that the old familiar story, acknowledged everywhere in words on Sundays and disregarded or openly denied on week-days, was, after all, true. His writings, every one of them, ... were to this same purpose and on this same text -- that truth must be spoken and justice must be done; on any other conditions, no real commonwealth, no common welfare, is permitted or possible.