Charles Henry Brent

“ The people who worship in the same building neither know one another nor, in many instances, desire to. This is simply fatal to ideal public worship, one purpose of which at any rate is to quicken and seal the sympathy that already exists as the result of intercourse in the outside world. It is a grave responsibility for any one, for the sake of what he may deem to be larger spiritual privileges, to leave the church of the locality in which he lives and where his natural duties and friendships lie, to go to some distant place of worship where fellowship is impossible. ”

“ Still once more, when we turn to literature the Mystic Sense is a pole-star. History is a museum of the curios of yesterday, [62] a pile of bones, a series of occurrences, a collection of bald facts as cold and bare as a heap of pebbles, until the Mystic Sense enters the sterile valley and brings with it the breath of life. An idiot with a memory can collect past facts as easily as a wee toddler can collect shells on the sea shore and to as good purpose. ”

“ The earliest dawn of religion perceived Him in His works of beauty and majesty,—the sun, the stars, the river, the tempest. And if He is immanent in that which is less, it is only logic to say that He must of necessity be in that which is greater—if in the world of things, much more then in the world of men, in the individual and in society. But so deep is man's instinctive reverence, so abiding his sense of unworthiness, that it needed the Incarnation to convince man that he was destined to become the heaven of God. ”

“ Human life has a craving for the beautiful which is a phase of strength and an aspect of the real. Literature is the recorded expression of human life and thought, colored by the character of its various authors. [18] Art is literature on canvas, in vibrant sounds, and in stone.
Poetry is a necessary and not an ornamental part of literature. It is to a large extent the mystical embodiment of prose, or perhaps it would be truer to say that it bears somewhat the same relation to prose that hypothesis does to science. At any rate it is the distinctive literature of the Mystic Sense. ”

“ Nor is it hard to reconcile the idea of a feast with this meagre meal of a morsel of bread and a sip of wine; for everyday experience has prepared us for the conveyance of great wealth through what has no intrinsic excellence. If a scrap of paper can have the value of heaps of gold, and, by the law of association, an age-worn trinket can become of priceless worth, it suggests no unreality to claim that under certain conditions a simple meal becomes a royal banquet, filling heart and soul and mind, and admitting into the very presence of the Most Holy and Most High. ”

“ Man, unless he abdicates his manhood, a task so difficult as to verge on the impossible, must live by his Mystic Sense; he must keep touch with the unseen, or cease to be a man. To be a man, rounded and proportioned, complete and splendid, he must use his Mystic Sense not merely here and there but everywhere. The Mystic Sense has as true an existence in the whole personality, and relation to it, as the physical sense of touch, and is as acutely sensitive to the stimulus of the spiritual phase of reality as the body is to that of the material. ”

“ It is a great mistake for one to be satisfied with praying for, say, purity instead of "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." That is to ask for the crumb from the rich man's table when the rich man is beseeching you to sit by his side and share all that he has. Let us pray for purity by all means, though not as if it were a flower that grew in a bed all by itself. We can get one Christian grace only by aiming at all.
No less marked than the comprehension is the definiteness of the petitions of the Lord's Prayer. Each is as clear cut as a crystal. ”

“ In this way only is society preserved from becoming a mob of eccentrics and fanatics, each whirling in his own little circle. Commerce, art, science, letters, government, religion—in short every department of life you can think of requires such a mode of procedure for the protection of reality in its varied manifestations and for the protection of the individual against himself. But in no conditions is a social checking off of findings more essential than in the psychic or spiritual realm. ”

“ The hope of Christianity lies in its boldness. The Church is strong when she is daring, and only then; her strength rises and falls with her courage—victory is faith. [37] What an inspiration to every parish, the lowliest and poorest as well as the numerically strong and financially rich!—the uttermost part of the earth is within the reach of its influence: ay, more than that, is in need of its prayers and its labours. Work for foreign missions is the climax and crown of Christian life, not a sluggish tributary to it. ”

“ Fatalism is a disease of the Mystic Sense which substitutes acquiescence for reaction. It is the straw committing itself to the river, not the oarsman using the current to his own advantage. Acquiescence is too tame a virtue for man, if indeed it be a virtue at all.
Whatever credit we give to heredity for endowing us with the tendencies of our evil forbears, we must give it equal credit for endowing us with those of our good forbears. If you are determined to be fatalistic, be so fairly, recognizing the possible transmission of every kind of tendency. ”

“ True refinement is not the result of paltry conventionalism, the flimsy creation of an artificial society; true refinement is the inalienable possession of that character in which the Spirit of God rules, in which the material is made the handmaid of the spiritual. At first men went out into the highways of the city, armed with their privileges, thinking that they had everything to give. But they soon learned that this spirit could only end in condescension, which is fatal to fellowship, for fellowship means give and take, and that the poor and unprivileged had much to give. ”

“ It is one of the chief functions of the Mystic Sense to present hypotheses. Without hypothesis the reason is a shorn Samson. A goal must be postulated, otherwise the wood could not be seen for the trees, and the intellect would be hopelessly lost in a tangle of underbrush and smothered by the weight of its own learning. “While theory is aimless and impotent without experimental check, experiment is dead without some theory passing beyond the limits of ascertained knowledge to control it. ”

“ If God is silent when we ask for new knowledge of His Person and His love, may it not be that it is because we are substituting books about the Bible for an earnest study of the Bible itself, which contains a full answer to our prayer? Or if, when day after day we have prayed for the conversion of a relative, no response comes, may it not be that we have never put ourselves at the disposal of God to be the instrument for working out what is at once our desire and His purpose? ”

“ It is at once a super-sense giving us a bird’s-eye view of the universe which is not permitted at close quarters, and a sub-sense bringing before our attention the contents hidden beneath the surface of things. There are not two worlds, objective and subjective respectively, but two aspects of one world—things as they are in their absolute and ultimate being, and things as they are relatively or as apprehended by our cognitive powers. ”

“ The men we would like to know and serve, are no more worthy of attention than the men who stand shoulder to shoulder with us. But those who have the largest claim upon our attention and service, are our immediate friends and neighbours. Indeed the only way to arm ourselves against disappointment, as the boundaries of our fellowship are enlarged, is so to attach ourselves to the people near at hand as to learn the true dignity of all human nature and the almost unfathomable depths of every personality. ”

“ Seldom does a man make a contribution to progress without being temporarily at least discredited by those whom most of all he is aiming to benefit. Self-respect towers at such moments. A man of character will trust himself when all men doubt him but make allowance for their doubting, too; he will wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about, won’t deal in lies, or being hated won’t give way to hating. ”

“ The Son of Man standing on God's right hand, was the vision that enthralled him as the stones battered out his life. And it is this same [Pg 19] vision that makes the unseen world a reality to men now. Humanity is there at its centre, the pledge of sympathy, the promise of victory. Not by a flight of imagination but by the exercise of insight we can look and see the sympathetic face of the Son of Man, who is also the Son of God; and with the sight fellowship with God becomes possible, the string of the tongue is loosed and we are ready to pray. ”

“ It is too late in the day to pretend that morality and religion are synonymous, however intimate their relationship, or that the end of religion is to make men good. Righteousness, which is the Christian term for morality, is to be had only in part by the practice of embracing the excellent and bathing our mystic self in the fountain of ideals. The type of righteousness thus created can never be aught than self-conscious, like an overdressed woman, or a gaudy painting. The Mystic Sense must occupy itself in still higher altitudes. ”

“ But for the most part our lives are spent without much conscious recognition of the fact. He will be no more present at the last day when we stand before His throne than He is now. The only difference will be that then we shall see Him as He sees us; we shall be so wholly absorbed by that consciousness that there will be room for no other consideration as, God grant, there will be no other desire. But before that moment comes men must practise looking into His face by faith so that it will not be unfamiliar as the face of a stranger when the last veil is swept aside. ”

“ No man insults human nature or demeans his personality so much as he who bows down to these accidents, excepting only the man who receives homage on the ground not of what he is but of what he has. We may neither pay homage to, nor receive it for, any of those things which belong merely to time and of which death will strip us bare; though piety, spiritual wisdom, and all forms of moral power, always and everywhere, demand homage and reverence.
The true basis on which Christian fellowship is begun and maintained, is our common humanity—that which is essential and not that which is accidental. ”