No one can deny that the New Testament has variety as well as unity. It is the variety which gives interest to the unity. What is it in which these people, differing as widely as they do, are vitally and fundamentally at one, so that through all their differences they form a brotherhood and are conscious of an indissolubale spiritual bond? There can be no doubt that that which unites them is a common relation to Christ -- a common faith in Him, involving religious convictions about Him.
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Continuing a series on God and the human condition: That Jones shall worship the "god within him" turns out read more
Continuing a series on God and the human condition: That Jones shall worship the "god within him" turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon -- anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.
Love is the greatest thing that God can give us; for Himself is love: and it is the greatest thing read more
Love is the greatest thing that God can give us; for Himself is love: and it is the greatest thing we can give to God; for it will also give ourselves, and carry with it all that is ours. The apostle calls it the band of perfection; it is the old, and it is the new, and it is the great commandment, and it is all the commandments; for it is the fulfilling of the Law. It does the work of all the graces without any instrument but its own immediate virtue. For as the love of sin makes a man sin against all his own reason, and all the discourses of wisdom, and all the advices of his friends, and without temptation and without opportunity, so does the love of God: it makes a man chaste without the laborious arts of fasting and exterior disciplines, temperate in the midst of feasts, and is active enough to choose it without any intermedial appetites, and reaches at glory through the very heart of grace, without any other aims but those of love. It is a grace that loves God for Himself, and our neighbors for God. The consideration of God's goodness and bounty, the experience of those profitable and excellent emanations from Him, may be, and most commonly are, the first motive of our love; but when we are once entered, and have tasted the goodness of God, we love the spring for its own excellency, passing from passion to reason, from thanking to adoring, from sense to spirit, from considering ourselves to union with God: and this is the image and little representation of heaven; it is beatitude in picture, or rather the infancy and beginning of glory.
When all is done, there is no such error or heresy, nothing so fundamentally opposed to religion, as a wicked read more
When all is done, there is no such error or heresy, nothing so fundamentally opposed to religion, as a wicked life.
Feast of Justin, Martyr at Rome, c.165 Commemoration of Angela de'Merici, Founder of the Institute of St. Ursula, 1540 read more
Feast of Justin, Martyr at Rome, c.165 Commemoration of Angela de'Merici, Founder of the Institute of St. Ursula, 1540 To make the improving of our own character our central aim is hardly the highest kind of goodness. True goodness forgets itself and goes out to do the right thing for no other reason than that it is right.
Christianity does not remove you from the world and its problems; it makes you fit to live in it, triumphantly read more
Christianity does not remove you from the world and its problems; it makes you fit to live in it, triumphantly and usefully.
Feast of Benedict of Nursia, Father of Western Monasticism, c.550 And have the bright immensities received our risen Lord Where read more
Feast of Benedict of Nursia, Father of Western Monasticism, c.550 And have the bright immensities received our risen Lord Where light-years frame the Pleiades and point Orion's sword? Do flaming suns his footsteps trace through corridors sublime, The Lord of interstellar space and Conqueror of time? The heaven that hides Him from our sight knows neither near nor far: An altar candle sheds its light as surely as a star; And where His loving people meet to share the gift divine, There stands He with unhurrying feet, and Heaven's splendors shine.
Commemoration of Osmund, Bishop of Salisbury, 1099 The glory of God is a living man; and the life of read more
Commemoration of Osmund, Bishop of Salisbury, 1099 The glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God.
If we are to accept the teaching of Jesus at all, then the only test of the reality of a read more
If we are to accept the teaching of Jesus at all, then the only test of the reality of a man's religion is his attitude to his fellow men. The only possible proof that a man loves God is the demonstrated fact that he loves his fellow men.
Feast of Willibrord of York, Archbishop of Utrecht, Apostle of Frisia, 739 The great need today among the young read more
Feast of Willibrord of York, Archbishop of Utrecht, Apostle of Frisia, 739 The great need today among the young is the strengthening of belief in things spiritual, for in spite of the superhuman advances in science, invention, and culture, none of this is attributed to God's gift to man; in fact, the increase of knowledge and the cult of education have but given to youth a self-reliant independence where religion has no place, and beyond admitting that Christ was "the best man that ever lived," there are few who concede any other tribute to the Creator. And yet the saving principles of the world are rooted in Christ, implanted in him; the Truth by which men live is the Truth as taught and lived by Jesus.
