Henry Giles

“ We are zealous in the assertion of it, not for its mere metaphysical correctness, but for its moral power and its moral consistency. It does not divide our hearts, and it does not confuse our heads. It leads our minds up to one spirit, infinite in power, infinite in wisdom, and infinite in goodness. Without confusion or perplexity we can trace God in all and all in God: in the atom that trembles in a sunbeam, as in the planet that moves in boundless light, from the blush of a flower to the glory of the heavens—from the throb of an insect to the life of an immortal. ”

“ We behold him, whose soul was never tainted with sin, turn most mercifully on the repentant sinner, striking the heart with rending anguish, yet filling the eye with sweetest and most hopeful tears. We see him with a bosom throbbing with all human charities, and an ear open to every cry of woe and wretchedness. We see him in all unselfish sacrifices, and all generous labours; and regarding our nature in him as most lovely, most glorious, and most triumphant, we rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory. We see him as the most perfect image of his Father ”

“ When I stand at the cross I have man imaged in fears, in struggles and in death. I have around me our nature in its crimes and passions; but when I see the ascending and glorified Christ, I behold humanity in its most triumphant hopes:—When I stand over the silent tomb of Jesus, and would weep, as if all beneath and beyond the skies were hopeless, a light shines out from the darkness, and throws a halo of peace about the desponding soul. ”

“ Our own conscience is the window of heaven through which we gaze on God: and, as its colours perpetually change, his aspect changes too; if they are bright and fair, he dwells as in the warm light of a rejoicing love; if they are dark and turbid, he hides himself in robes of cloud and storm. When you have lost your self-respect, you have never thought yourself an object of divine complacency. ”

“ When I consider him not only as possessed with the consciousness of an unexampled and unbounded majesty, but as recognizing a kindred nature in all human beings, and living and dying to raise them to an anticipation of his divine glories; and when I see him, under these views, allying himself to men by the tenderest ties, embracing them with a spirit of humanity, which no insult, injury, or pain could for a moment repel or overpower, I am filled with wonder, as well as reverence and love. ”

“ We meet with nothing in nature to impeach the Impartiality of our Heavenly Father. We believe that the same God who sends his sun and his rain upon the evil and upon the just, is willing to shed the dew of his blessing upon the hearts of all his children. We rejoice to overlook the vain and perishable distinctions of time; to believe that all the human family, partakers of one spirit, meet in the love of the universal Father; that God in heaven is no respecter of persons; and that the humblest and most neglected of his children may rise into hallowed intercourse with the infinite spirit. ”

“ Sin is misery, and the worst of miseries,—one that carries with it its own vengeance, is self-punished and self-cursed. True, we recognize no omnipresent and invisible tempter; true, we hold no gross and eternal punishment; we preach no original malediction, and no inherent depravity; we proclaim no sin which blots out all light and hope around the mercy-seat of God, and scathes the heart of man with everlasting despair. True, we show you no maniac penitents, bewildered in the madness of remorse, shrieking on the death-bed which conscience peoples with furies. ”

“ Our human nature is said to be so constituted, that the burden of sin, on the conscience once awakened, is intolerable: our spirit cries aloud for mercy; yet is so straitened by the bands of sin, so conscious of the sad alliance lingering still, so full of hesitancy and shame when seeking the relief of prayer, so blinded by its tears when scanning the heavens for an opening of light and hope, that there is no freedom, no unrestrained and happy love to God ”

“ Jesus Christ of Nazareth, God hath presented to us simply in his inspired humanity. Him we accept, not indeed as very God, but as the true image of God, commissioned to show what no written doctrinal record could declare, the entire moral perfections of Deity. We accept,—not indeed his body, not the struggles of his sensitive nature, not the travail of his soul, but his purity, his tenderness, his absolute devotion to the great idea of right, his patient and compassionate warfare against misery and guilt, as the most distinct and beautiful expression of the Divine mind. ”

“ The imagination which overlooks and forgets all that is sacred in the common earth and sky, that gives itself over to the dream, that all is dead mechanism,—downright clock-work, wound up, perhaps at creation, but running down of itself till doom; the heart that feels nothing divine in life, and nothing holy in man; that has lost, from Epicurean sloth and sickness of soul, the healthy faculty of spontaneous wonder, and worship ever fresh,—are the pupils most ripe for this tutelage. ”

“ Regarding Christ as our perfect, immortal, but human Brother, we have the living evidence that God is our Father, and Heaven is our Home.—Our views of Christ makes his history of most precious value to us—his life, his death, his crucifixion and his resurrection—Christ becomes to us the great interpreter of Providence, equally of its fears and hopes. He becomes to us the symbol of humanity, equally of its grief and glory—near his cross we weep over death, and at his tomb we rejoice in the certainty of life. ”

“ And yet this great, this glorious universe is his—is his workmanship—it came not up in a night, it is not to perish in a night—the earth is long to be green, and the heavens are to be bright. Throughout the space that has no limit, throughout the time that has no end, the stars are to shine, and systems are to move onward in their unmeasured and their trackless glory. And yet, if orthodox, we must believe there is an endless hell whose smoke of torment must ascend for ever against their brightness. ”

“ And the Spirit that animates the whole is like that of the Prophet of Nazareth; the thoughts that fly upon the swift light throughout creation, charged with fates unnumbered, are like the healing mercies of One that passed no sorrow by. The government of this world, its mysterious allotments of good and ill, its successions of birth and death, its hopes of progress and of peace, each life of individual or nation, is under the administration of One, of whose rectitude and benevolence, whose sympathy with all the holiest aspirations of our virtue and our love, Christ is the appointed emblem. ”

“ I love him for the spirit of magnanimity, constancy, and fearless rectitude with which, amid peril and opposition, he devoted himself to the work which God gave him to do. I love him for the wise and enlightened zeal with which he espoused the true, the spiritual interests of mankind, and through which he lived and died to redeem them from every sin, to frame them after his own God-like virtue. I love him, I have said, for his moral excellence; I know nothing else to love. I know nothing so glorious in the Creator or his creatures. ”

“ To millions, heaven seems to be for the soul what the grave is for the body—a place of mere repose. If something more than this, an elysium for indolence, a kind of region of complacent idealism, where the faithful and elect are to enjoy ecstacies and prayer, musings and melodies, which the coarse struggles of earth forbade, in which the cares of the world left no time to engage;—the clear skies and still waters of paradise, the golden harps, the incense, and the music of angels, to relieve from weariness, strife, and pain, toil-worn and time-worn spirits. ”

“ What shall we then say of an infinite holiness, enlightened by infinite wisdom, armed with infinite power, allowing this condition to exist? If the doctrine of eternal torment be true, no such attribute as divine mercy can have being: if this doctrine be true, a God of goodness is a fiction of imagination, the creation of a brain-sick enthusiasm, the dream of amiable but unfounded hopes. It is of no purpose to qualify in these things: there is no room in the same universe for a good God and an eternal hell: if this doctrine be true, the past is a wreck, and the future a curse. ”

“ He lived that men might know their own nature, and work out its glory for themselves. He lived that he might rescue that nature from low views of its duties and its powers, by showing humanity in the image of God. He bore his cross that men might look to Calvary and behold the moral heroism of the meekest heart when it trusts in God; with what serenity a filial faith can pass through the vicissitudes of severest trial, and take the cup from the hand of a Father, though he presents it from out the darkest cloud of his providence. ”

“ The pavements over which we tread in many a secluded ruin may have been worn by kneeling martyrs that now sleep in peace beneath them: within these massive buildings so grey and time-wrecked, how often might be found at the evening hour, when the dim religious light melted through the painted windows, and the vesper song softened through the lofty vaults, scattered worshippers who were feeding their immortal life: how frequently within those temples may the serf in faith and prayer have forgotten his bonds, and only remembered that he was the brother of Jesus, and the son of God. ”

“ We meet in the world the children of one Parent, with the same souls, the same hopes, the same capacities for joy; with the same God to comfort their sorrows and to guard their happiness; breathing on them the same holy and inspiring influences; leading them to the same Saviour, and beckoning them to the same Heaven; and our love for God and our fellowship with man thus mingle intimately in the same heart and shed through it the serene and blissful light of a full, radiant, and unclouded Piety. ”

“ We look not on the deepest, the deadliest, and the worst instance of human depravity, as beyond correction, beyond improvement, beyond the power of Almighty God; we look upon no ignorance that may not be enlightened; upon no vice that may not be removed; upon no human countenance so scarred with the traces of depravity, as to leave nothing visible but the hand-writing of reprobation; God forbid that we should behold any human being with humanity’s capacities, destined, beyond amendment, to hopeless corruption and to incorrigible misery. ”

“ I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ. It has an immortal life, and will gather strength from the violence of its foes. It is equal to all the wants of men. The greatest minds have found in it the light which they most anxiously desired. The most sorrowful and broken spirits have found in it a healing balm for their woes. It has inspired the sublimest virtues and the loftiest hopes. For the corruptions of such a religion I weep, and I should blush to be their advocate; but of the Gospel itself I can never be ashamed.”—Channing. ”

“ The first remains, and ever will remain, worthy of the glorious joy, with which Paul regarded and expounded it. God has committed the rule of this world to no exclusive Prince, and no sacerdotal power, and no earthly majesty; but to one whose spirit, too divine to be limited to place and time, broke through clouds of sorrow into the clearest heaven; and thither has since been drawing our human love, though for ages now he has been unseen and immortal. An impartial God, a holy and spiritual Law, an infinite hope for all men,—are given to us by that generous cross. ”

“ Every dictate of Duty is the spirit of God. Every answer to the prayer of a pure heart is the spirit of God. Every movement of disinterested love is the spirit of God. Every self-sacrifice for the sake of justice or of mercy is made in the strength of the Spirit of God. Every inward hope in this world’s darkness, and undying trust amid this world’s deaths, is an inspiration from Him who is a very present help in the time of trouble, a spiritual intimation from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. ”

“ The evils of sin I hold to be terrible; the penalty of sin I hold to be inevitable—to be removed by no sacrifice, to be washed out by no expiation—to be escaped only in the criminals rising out of the corruption by experience and wisdom, to a purer moral state. The punishment of sin I believe to be not only inevitable, but also enduring, enduring in proportion to indulgence and malignity. Thoughts, I admit, which have wrought themselves into the very texture of the intellectual nature; feelings which have rooted themselves into the heart ”

“ Dark and leaden clouds of materialism hide the heaven from us: red gleams of fanaticism pierce through, vainly striving to reveal it; and not till the weight is heaved from off the air, and the thunders roll down the horizon, will the serene light of God flow upon us, and the blue infinite embrace us again. Meanwhile, we must reverently love the faith we have: to quit it for one that we have not, were to lose the breath of life, and die.
NOTE.
The Jewish Passover not a proper Sacrifice. ”

“ If his purity and happiness be within the bounds of possibility, if his eternal misery by any degree of energy can be averted, are we to believe that a God who has infinite benevolence wills him to perish; are we to believe that a God who has infinite power will exert none of it to save the most glorious of his works from utter destruction? Can we suppose that God, omnipotent and most wise, would reverse eternally such capacities for goodness and happiness, and instead of training them to be instruments of boundless utility, would condemn them to be agents of eternal evil? ”

“ The sense of duty presents man to us in the most glorious aspects of his nature; and that sentiment is not always misdirected. By its power in the soul, we observe appetites governed, passions subjected, and temptation overcome; by its inspiration, when necessity calls, we observe men devoting themselves in the spirit of martyrdom to truth and right, casting pleasure aside, forsaking whatever was dear to them, and despising life itself. Whatever change for good has occurred in the history of man, is a witness for the force of duty, for it has been worked out in much travail and self-denial ”