Edward Stuart Talbot

“ The business is too big for want of thought. Not students only, or leaders, but our rank and file must be praying in their closets; they must be wrestling, themselves, for the living truths in Scripture, putting the truisms and commonplaces of religion into the fire of the Spirit till they glow white as truths indeed. Press home, face doubt, look into the problems, try your teachers, and choose the deepest. And all this because so to do it is to open the channels for the inflow of God's working, to keep ready for its touch, responsive to its call. ”

“ Happy we, if resolutely minimizing controversy by rising to what is really highest, we can unitedly lay hold upon the truth of the living Giver present to give us in His own way living gifts, parts of the one Gift which is life from Himself. Happy if we can recognize that different races, times, and strains of opinion or temperament may treat these great things of divine operation with more or less of simplicity or splendour, and mean by both alike the same purpose of doing fullest reverence to the real working of God amongst and within us. ”

“ What is it again which lends attraction to that strange farrago which calls itself "Christian Science," and in spite of all its irritating paradoxes and pseudo-science, secures it a welcome from many who are both able and good? The problem has been studied by one of the ablest and most vigorous of contemporary philosophers, and he finds as the secret that it comes to weary and baffled minds with a strong summons to recognize and respond to the divine presence, the divine element, in themselves. ”

“ There is a great vogue for the name of mysticism, and though much of it is superficial and its meaning indistinct, it is pretty clear that men are not thinking so much of that mysticism which seeks God by abstraction from all visible and created things, but rather of that which would penetrate through them to some meaning at their heart, some presence which they half disclose and half conceal. ”

“ It is as though in some hill country where we have been following our pleasant woodland tracks and mounting little heights and points of vantage, we come out upon the open and discern, high above us, the lofty peak or the solemn mass of the great hill or moorland about whose flanks we have been moving, whose swell and lift, though itself was unknown to us, has been under our feet as we mounted, and towards whose height converging tracks have come. ”

“ If not, are we, perchance, at all in the case of that young man who had his religious interests, and could ask his questions, and was indeed in character and conduct not far from the Kingdom of God, but could not bear the touch of sacrifice, and wished the great possessions to be left out of his practical problem? Are we to find here in part some inner secret of the little effectiveness of much which seems so true, and good, and earnest, and beautiful in the Church work of to-day? ”

“ Is the truth, so central to him, one of special significance for our own time? We ought, on an occasion like that which brings us here, to consider, to walk about Zion and tell the towers thereof, to take account, to see how we stand, to look whether we move and whither, to note what the days last past have done for us, where the hopes or dangers of those next to come may be. ”

“ There is so much, so frightfully much, that wants doing for human life and for the poor, and the love of God working in us alone makes zeal; there is so much need for stooping, for coming down to do it, and the love of God in us alone makes humility; there is so much call for every Christian to show the spirit of service, and nothing can prompt and sustain them in doing so but the grace of Him Who took the form of a servant and was among us as He that serveth. ”

“ We find within the area of Christian belief, even within the limits of our own part of the Church, the mutual distrust and defiance of those who press the reality, the significance, the necessity of sacraments, and those who more or less deny or distrust them, and who look for the reality and purity of religion to what they describe as more independent and direct contact with God. ”

“ The privileges of the life of God within us is an awful thing. It has a touch of fire. To be named spiritual men (and it is the calling of every one of us to be so named) is something to abash us to the earth when we think of what we are. ”

“ Not what God prescribes to us, nor even what He sends us help to do; not what we do for God; not merely what is like God in us; but God actually and indeed working within us. Now, this is plainly not a truth of revelation alone and exclusively; it is one in which the poet, the philosopher, the believer in natural religion have their part, and perhaps find their inspiration. But it forms their common ground with the Christian, and therefore it is of high interest to see that in the forms which they too recognize, it has come home of late with fresh force to men's minds. ”

“ We complain to each other of prevalent indifference to religion. We note the breakdown of pious custom and wholesome restraints. We do not feel, among religious people themselves, a countervailing depth and earnestness. If we have ourselves felt the strength of one of the great religious movements, we recognize with sorrow that it does not hold men as it did. ”

“ And the last thing, as you will guess, is charity, or shall I say service. For God is Love, and more and more we realize that only where love is can God work; that love prompts sacrifice and controls it into sweet, wholesome, and helpful forms. ”

“ Perhaps there is no better or, in the deepest sense, more encouraging result of such thoughts and questionings than when they bring us to the clearer recognition of some great truth which has been the spring and common secret of movements outwardly diverse, towards which many paths run up, which sometimes the very failure of things wherein we trusted may serve only the more clearly to disclose; and to which, in proportion as we discern it, we ought more consciously and directly to turn for strength and help. ”

“ We doubt whether we are making way. There is a sense that we are not on the flow of the tide, and perhaps feel its ebb. We look back over religious history, and discern the difference, more clear than the reasons of it, between times of spiritual movement and awakening, and those which are stagnant and uninspired. ”

“ There, let us strive constantly and passionately to realize, is God's own expression. His own revelation of that by which man's natural sense of God's immanence is fulfilled, of that by which the living presence of the Incarnate is continued and embodied. ”

“ Surely, we find this inner unity in the likeness between the most spiritual utterances of widely separated men: it is witnessed even by the kinship between weaker tendencies, as in the parallelism between the sentimentalism of some sacramental devotions and that of some evangelical hymns, which harp on thoughts and phrases such as the sweetness of Jesus. ”

“ For there is but one God, in nature and redemption, and one Lord, the Word, Who is, as the old theologians delighted to teach, the λόγος σπερματικὸς through all creation, as well as the Incarnate Jesus Christ. ”

“ Is there, as I asked at first, a great truth coming out clearer, in the light of which we may read afresh and more deeply the meaning of what we have, gaining new keenness in our own hold of it and fresh power in our presentation of it to others? ”

“ Then would controversies be changed into that which they ought to be, and appear as differences of spiritual insight among men joined together in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God; then out of Christian families would young men and maidens come forth abundantly for every needed ministry; then out of England's enormous wealth would the faith of her Church's sons unlock treasures of liberal and costly giving for the support of the ministry, and for the attack upon the vast tasks of evangelization in her towns ”

“ It is for this that in his rage of desire one man will break the mould of every form to get straight, as he thinks, at the precious ointment of the presence; to secure this, surer than all words, safe from dependence upon wavering moods, another man will exalt to the uttermost the consecrated method, the definite, local, almost visible gift. ”

“ Science is reverent in the presence of mystery which she has herself helped to reveal. The inadequacy of merely materialist explanations is recognized. Matter itself has almost lost substance and reality under the ever-advancing power of analysis ”

“ His word comes not at all where we should have expected: its call is ever new as well as old; it is heard only by those whose expectant and attuned ears are not altogether full of the sounds which their own voices make. ”

“ Here, as elsewhere, grumbling and whining do not help. If there are generations to whom God, in His mysterious wisdom, gives more, and others to whom He gives less of His Spirit's power, and if He should have set us in one of the latter, this is, so far as it is independent of ourselves, a matter for humble submission. ”

“ They feel the loss in themselves, and they think that they observe it in others. Differing between themselves in other things, they agree in this discouragement. It is keener, perhaps, from the very fact that religious activity of all sorts is so various, so strong, and almost feverish amongst us, just because in so many ways the experiments have been tried and the means used which we had hoped would increase the Church's grip upon her work and affect most for good the religion of the nation. ”

“ Generations have not their call alike: they may be successive and different; or, again, the call of one generation may be to see in that of its predecessor something which could not at the time be discerned, which comes clear only under time's sifting power. ”

“ And then in the nineteenth century and well within the time of the older among us, the swiftly-disclosed fascination of natural things, the recognition of law and uniformity, the apparent sufficiency of nature to explain herself, seemed to leave no room for Goal ”

“ This is the conflict between the Roman Catholic and the Society of Friends, between the Churchman and the Plymouth Brother, and in a degree, within the English Church and even within the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, between the High Churchman and the Low; being in truth, far more than is recognized, a difference of mental temperament before ever it is one of objective creed. ”

“ Still less shall we seek help by "dotting the i's and crossing the t's" of our own practice or teaching; seeking ever to prolong a line of development continually in one direction; to force the note and give sharper accent to what is already loud and shrill. ”