Edward Stuart Talbot

“ Faith, but not blind faith. We know the habitation of His seat. At the centre of His ways and thoughts is in fullness and perfection inconceivable the power of that which we know as love. That is the witness of Christ and of the Cross, and from its very depths the faith of our conscience echoes to its truth. The power of the dark hours for those that love God is to make that truth more luminous by the very darkness. ”

“ Paget has been personally known in Oxford for fifteen years, the larger half of them spent in the Deanery of Christ Church. She threw herself with all her heart into the duty of entertaining others—from the highest to the humblest; and, so filling a great position with transparent sincerity of purpose, found, in the very unreserve of service, its own healthy gladness of spirit. The whole community knew her brightness in entertaining. ”

“ The heroes of faith in the Old Testament are brought up in the New as our examples, and by faith we walk, as Abraham and Moses and the prophets walked, expecting, desiring, trusting. We know and we do not know: we have to bear the clouds and darkness, though the love revealed shines in our hearts.
Brethren, I have thought that I might rightly remind you of all this to-day, when one thought fills every heart. I do not seem to-day, in Christ Church, as a Christ Church man to Christ Church men, to be addressing a public congregation, but rather to be speaking to a family and household in grief. ”

“ The clouds and darkness are not gone: the mystery is still about Him, and His ways past finding out. We have indeed seen the Father, if we know our Lord: with open face those that are His reflect as a mirror the glory of the Lord; and yet, the Apostle who wrote those words himself acknowledges, 'we see in a mirror, darkly,' in a riddle. Doubtless this is right, as it is natural and inevitable. For we are men as they were. One discipline suits us all. It could not be that they should walk by faith, and we by sight. ”

“ His understanding looked out upon this wonderful world, this immeasurable and unimaginable system of things in which he lived, as we do; upon the lesser world within the world, the life of man, so familiar yet so baffling, so intelligible in the way that right upon the whole brings its own reward, and wrong its own hurt and ruin, and yet so utterly perplexing in its changes and chances of fortune ”

“ Human faculties are as unable as ever they were to understand all the ways of God, to see as He sees. For us faith has been given clearer light and surer ground, to make it, doubtless, capable of more, to strengthen it perhaps for even harder trial. But faith is still the occasion of man's great opportunity ”

“ They reassure us, and give us hope; they give us quiet rebuke, but they inspire us, too; they call us back, and call us on. They are our witnesses of what life may be. Their power over us is the strongest and gentlest that there is. ”

“ It is best to deal quietly and firmly with such thoughts, to remind ourselves that there is, indeed, in them no reason or truth. They really demand that the ways of God should be clear at every step to the wit of us, the atom-creatures of His hand, and we know and own that to ask this is only foolish. The clouds and darkness must be there. His ways are not as our ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts. ”

“ You had been so drawn together by the quiet spell of gracious influence that now the sorrow at the centre of your common life is felt, I believe, with real and aching pain throughout it by seniors and juniors, residents and non-residents, the servants as well as the members of the House. Such heightening and quickening of college feeling is a rare thing ”

“ For to those that trust there springs up light in the darkness. He feeds them in the time of dearth. Let none of us, then, who are to-day in the outer courts of this holy place of Christian sorrow linger only among grieving—much less bitter—thoughts. ”

“ The best that is in each of us lives by and is wrought out of the best that we have seen and known, and comes to us ministered, as it were, by certain figures, who live in our memory, and to whom, in times of difficulty, or trouble, or sin, our thoughts instinctively turn. ”

“ But the part of her work which, I am sure, lay nearest to her heart was that which was concerned with the members of Christ Church, especially the undergraduate members. In this it is no exaggeration to say that her skill amounted to genius. A large College is necessarily a difficult place to manage. The men come from very various schools and homes, and have ideas and associations of the most miscellaneous kind. ”