The Christian cell in a factory or a professional circle, funding its own activities, deciding its own pattern of work, read more

The Christian cell in a factory or a professional circle, funding its own activities, deciding its own pattern of work, studying the Bible and perhaps celebrating the Lord's supper as an entity on its own, comes very much closer to Independency as Robert Browne saw it than the unholy isolationism of a prosperous suburban church, with 200 members who scarcely know each other by sight. If a sizable proportion of the Free Church ministry were enabled to become itinerant once again -- not necessarily itinerant in the geographical sense, but itinerant in the complex mazes of contemporary society, fathers in God to Christian organisms evolved by the lay men and women who spend their lives in these mazes -- new heart would be put into both ministry and laity, and incidentally, new impetus given to the search for Christian unity.

Feast of Anskar, Archbishop of Hamburg, Missionary to Denmark and Sweden, 865 None use instituted forms or ways read more

Feast of Anskar, Archbishop of Hamburg, Missionary to Denmark and Sweden, 865 None use instituted forms or ways of worship profitably, but such as find communion with God in them, or are seriously humbled because they do not.

Feast of William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, Teacher, 1944 The principle of sacrifice is that we choose read more

Feast of William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, Teacher, 1944 The principle of sacrifice is that we choose to do or to suffer what apart from our love we should not choose to do or to suffer.

Holy Saturday If I ask to be delivered from trial rather than for deliverance out of it, to read more

Holy Saturday If I ask to be delivered from trial rather than for deliverance out of it, to the praise of His glory; if I forget that the way of the Cross leads to the Cross and not to a bank of flowers; if I regulate my life on these lines, or even unconsciously my thinking, so that I am surprised when the way is rough and think it strange, "Think it not strange, Count it all joy," then I know nothing of Calvary love.

The principal part of faith is patience.

The principal part of faith is patience.

My father had never lost his temper with us, never beaten us, but we had for him that feeling often read more

My father had never lost his temper with us, never beaten us, but we had for him that feeling often described as fear, which is something quite different and far deeper than alarm. It was that sense which, without irreverence, I have thought to find expressed by the great evangelists when they speak of the fear of God. One does not fear God because He is terrible, but because He is literally the soul of goodness and truth, because to do Him wrong is to do wrong to some mysterious part of oneself, and one does not know exactly what the consequences may be.

In vain does anyone pretend that he will be a martyr for his religion, when he will not rule an read more

In vain does anyone pretend that he will be a martyr for his religion, when he will not rule an appetite nor restrain lust nor subdue a passion nor cross his covetousness and ambition for the sake of it, and in hope of that eternal life which God that cannot lie hath promised. He that refuses to do the less is not like to do the greater. It is very improbable that a man will die for his religion, when he cannot be persuaded to live according to it. He that cannot take up a resolution to live a saint, hath a demonstration within himself that he is never like to die a martyr.

It may seem absurd to some that all desires by which man is by nature affected are so completely condemned read more

It may seem absurd to some that all desires by which man is by nature affected are so completely condemned -- although they have been bestowed by God himself, the author of nature. To this I reply that we do not condemn those inclinations which God so engraved upon the character of man at his first creation, that they were eradicable only with humanity itself; but only those bold and unbridled impulses which contend against God's control.

It is easy to recognize, in the relational rigidities of many chapel-going people, the "negative reflex actions" of a character read more

It is easy to recognize, in the relational rigidities of many chapel-going people, the "negative reflex actions" of a character structure which has survived the destruction of its intellectual and moral foundations. But equally, no one can go far in the Free Churches without lighting upon the new or newish cult of "sincerity as an end in itself" -- the first refuge of minds too lazy to rebuild their intellectual foundations -- and the sentimental distrust of "orthodoxy" and "authority", in theological contexts at least.