James Mudge

“ The Chancellor d’Aguesseau writes that Fénelon’s submission made him the hero of the day. “It stands the solitary example in history of a controversy upon a point of such moment which one single sentence terminated at the instant, without its reproduction in any other form, without any attempt to reverse it by power or elude it by distinctions. The glory of it is due to Fénelon, who was able to see that a very great desire to justify one’s self often does more harm than good, and that the surest way to obliterate wrongs unjustly imputed is to let them be forgotten and die out in silence.” ”

“ This is the whole of religion: to get out of self in order to get into God.
To be a Christian is to be an imitator of Jesus Christ. In what can we imitate Him if not in his humiliation? Nothing else can bring us near to Him. We may adore Him as omnipotent, fear Him as just, love Him with all our heart as good and merciful, but we can only imitate Him as humble, submissive, poor, and despised.
What men stand most in need of is the knowledge of God. It is not astonishing that men do so little for God, and that the little which they do costs them so much. ”

“ And sin is simply to desire or will anything otherwise than the one perfect good and the one eternal will, or to wish to have a will of one’s own.”
“Sin is to will, desire, or love otherwise than God doth. Things do not thus will, desire, or love: therefore things are not evil; all things are good.”
“He who is truly a virtuous man would not cease to be so to gain the whole world; yea, he would rather die a miserable death. To him virtue is its own reward, and he is content therewith, and would take no treasure or riches in exchange for it.” ”

“ Christian perfection is not that rigorous, tedious, cramping thing that many imagine. It demands only an entire surrender of everything to God, from the depths of the soul; and the moment this takes place, whatever is done for Him becomes easy. They who are God’s without reserve are in every state content; for they will only what He wills, and desire to do for Him whatever He desires them to do. They strip themselves of everything, and in this nakedness find all things a hundred-fold. ”

“ Happy is he who never hesitates; who fears only that he follows with too little readiness; who would rather do too much against self than too little. Blessed is he who, when asked for a sample, boldly presents his entire stock and suffers God to cut from the whole cloth. It is thought that this state is a painful one. It is a mistake; here is peace and liberty; here the heart, detached from everything, is immeasurably enlarged, so as to become illimitable; nothing cramps it; and, in accordance with the promise, it becomes, in a certain sense, one with God Himself. ”

“ It would be as great a wonder to see a person full of self become in a moment dead to all self-interest and all sensitiveness as it would be to see a slumbering infant wake in the morning a fully developed man. God works in a mysterious way in grace as well as in nature, concealing His operations under an imperceptible succession of events, and thus keeps us always in the darkness of faith. ”

“ Why should not the Church in general, and the Methodist Church in particular, get a new grip on this much neglected but every way fruitful truth of the Divine indwelling and the Divine immanence, God in all and all in God, the universe but the will of God expressed in forms of time and space, humanity reaching its highest point of development when it most completely entemples Deity, nature a symbol of God, God revealed in His works? ”

“ For one in the flower of his manhood and at the zenith of his capacities, possessing the gift of language in a marvelous degree, with a filled and cultured brain, to be thrown so absolutely out of his element, out of the world of books and intellectual equals, exiled to a remote corner of the realm amid strangers, was a calamity whose gravity, on one side, it would be wrong to overlook. ”

“ To the sincere desire to do the will of God we must add a cheerful spirit that is not overcome when it has failed, but tries again and again to do better; hoping always to the very end to be able to do it; bearing with its own involuntary weakness as God bears with it; waiting with patience for the moment when it shall be delivered from it; going straight on in singleness of heart according to the strength that it can command; losing no time by looking back, nor making useless reflections when it falls, which can only embarrass and retard its progress. ”

“ Little faults become great in our eyes in proportion as the pure light of God increases in us, just as the sun in rising reveals the true dimensions of objects which were dimly and confusedly discovered during the night. Be sure that, with the increase of the inward light, the imperfections which you have hitherto seen will be beheld as far greater and more deadly in their foundations than you now conceive them, and that you will witness, in addition, the development of a crowd of others, of the existence of which you have not now the slightest suspicion. ”

“ God does not so much regard our actions as the motives of love from which they spring, and the pliability of our wills to His. Men judge our deeds by their outward appearance; with God, that which is most dazzling in the eyes of men is of no account. What He desires is a pure intention, a will ready for anything and ever pliable in His hands, and an honest abandonment of self; and all this can be much more frequently manifested on small than on extraordinary occasions; there will also be much less danger from pride, and the trial will be far more searching. ”

“ It is now our privilege to bid farewell to the noise of battle, and look at the good archbishop in the peaceful retirement of his great diocese, where, as all admit, his episcopal duties were perfectly performed. Even the most captious carpers and cavilers at Fénelon, who can see little or no good in any other part of his life and try hard to find some unworthy motive at the bottom of the acts that seem so fair, are sore put to it, when they come to this portion, to withhold a meed of hearty praise. ”

“ A nobler effusion of the indignation of insulted virtue and genius, eloquence has never produced. In the very first lines of it Fénelon placed himself above his antagonist, and to the last preserves his elevation. Never did genius and virtue obtain a more complete triumph. ”

“ Piety is very bustling, but it is not deep. The utterances of the Savior and His apostles are taken at a large discount, and the mass of believers are easily content with a low condition of spirituality. Hence the Church is feeble, and fails to impress itself strongly upon the world. It would be immensely benefited by a large infusion of the spirit of the true Mystic, who wages the most deadly war with all carnality; who has a terrible moral intensity; who renounces absolutely all that dims the radiance or shadows the image of the Perfect One in the mirror of the soul ”

“ In August, 1714, Fénelon lost the last of that special group who had stuck to him more closely than brothers, the Duke de Beauvilliers. They had never met since he left Versailles, but their hearts were most closely knit. “Our best friends,” he wrote, “are the source of our greatest sorrow and bitterness. One is tempted to say that all good friends should wait and die on the same day. Friendship will be the cause of my death.” ”

“ To desire to be despised, thought meanly of, accounted as naught, we can not recognize as a fruit of grace in a healthy mind rightly apprehensive of the vast importance to usefulness of a good reputation. To think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think is wrong, but so is it wrong to think of ourselves less highly than we ought. ”

“ I pass my years of banishment!
Where’er I dwell I dwell with Thee,
In heaven, in earth, or on the sea.
To me remains nor place nor time:
My country is in every clime;
I can be calm and free from care
On any shore since God is there.
While place we seek or place we shun,
The soul finds happiness in none ”

“ Plato teaches that the highest good is the greatest likeness to God; that the greatest happiness is the vision of God; that we should seek holiness, not for the sake of reward, but because it is the health of the soul, while vice is its disease; that goodness is unity and harmony, while evil disintegrates; that it is our duty to rise above the visible and transitory to the invisible and permanent.”
The Church has never lacked during its history for those who have followed this line of thought and cultivated this kind of experience. ”

“ You will find the weaknesses necessary to deprive you of all confidence in your own strength; but this discovery, far from discouraging, will but serve to destroy your self-reliance, and raze to the ground the edifice of pride.
Our faults, even those most difficult to bear, will all be of service to us if we make use of them for our humiliation without relaxing our efforts to correct them. We must bear with ourselves without either flattery or discouragement, a mean seldom attained. ”

“ If we were faultless we should not be so much annoyed by the defects of those with whom we associate. If we were to acknowledge honestly that we have not virtue enough to bear patiently with our neighbor’s weaknesses, we should show our own imperfection, and this alarms our vanity. We therefore make our weakness pass for strength, elevate it to a virtue, 216 and call it zeal. For it is not surprising to see how tranquil we are about the errors of others when they do not trouble us, and how soon this wonderful zeal kindles against those who excite our jealousy or weary our patience. ”

“ Denunciations of selfishness are always in order, but its boundaries are not so easily defined. Self-love—the instinctive desire or tendency that leads one to seek to promote his own well-being, a due care for one’s own happiness, essential to high endeavor and perfectly compatible with justice, generosity, and benevolence—is a component part of our nature, and must be carefully safeguarded. To talk about its annihilation or eradication is to talk foolishness ”

“ O how few there are who pray; for how few are they who desire what is truly good! Crosses, external and internal humiliation, renouncement of our own wills, the death of self, and the establishment of God’s throne upon the ruins of self-love,—these are indeed good. Not to desire these is not to pray; to desire them seriously, soberly, constantly, and with reference to all the 222 details of life,—this is true prayer. Alas! how many souls full of self and of an imaginary desire for perfection in the midst of hosts of voluntary imperfections, have never yet uttered this true prayer of the heart! ”

“ Shall we withhold our admiration from those who do not rise entirely superior to all their surroundings, and see things as we, in totally different conditions, see them? In that case, dealt with after so harsh a judgment, we ourselves might come off badly, and we should most certainly have to bar out from our favor a very large proportion of the men who have done the most for the world’s advancement. ”

“ One must use his best judgment, enlightened from all possible sources, as to what in any given case duty to self and duty to others demands. And that judgment he must follow, even when it materially differs from the opinion of those who may criticise his conduct. There is no virtue in wasting one’s self on impossible tasks. Self-sacrifice is never ethical if it be a willful spending of self to no purpose. One may do a serious wrong to himself, and confer no real good on any one else, by following the lead 206 of generous, uncalculating, unthinking impulses. ”

“ A life of faith produces two things: First, it enables us to see God in everything; secondly, it holds the mind in a state of readiness for whatever may be His will. This continual, unceasing dependence on God, this state of entire peace and acquiescence of the soul in whatever may happen, is the true silent martyrdom of self.
With the exception of sin, nothing happens in this world out of the will of God. It is He who is the author, ruler, and bestower of all ”

“ The exhortation never to think about one’s self is thoroughly mischievous, and can only lead to fanaticism and discouragement.
Self-control, not self-annihilation or extirpation, is the duty of the Christian. A man has perfect self-control when his highest powers hold the lower in subjection with perfect ease, and are themselves in complete harmony with the will of God. He is perfectly free from selfishness who gives to self only that degree of attention and care which is due, and in no way infringes on any of the rights of others. ”

“ He taught that Christian perfection consists in the peace of the soul, springing from a complete self-surrender into the hands of God, in the renouncement of all external, temporal things, and in the pure love of God free from all considerations of interest or hope of reward. A soul which desires the supreme good must renounce all sensual and material things, silence every impulse, and concentrate itself on God. In a state of perfect contemplation the soul desires absolutely nothing, not even its own salvation ”

“ His public and private life had been ruled by the fundamental principle which he did not fear to proclaim again and again as his conception of truest patriotism: “I love my family better than myself; I love my country better than my family; I love the human race better than my country.” ”

“ With some people, not only pride and hauteur render these duties very difficult, but great natural sensitiveness makes the practice of them nearly impossible, and, instead of respecting their neighbor with a true feeling of humility, all their charity amounts only to a sort of compassionate toleration that nearly resembles contempt.
Humility is the source of all true greatness; pride is ever impatient, ready to be offended. He who thinks nothing is due to him never thinks himself ill-treated; true meekness is not mere temperament, for this is only softness or weakness. ”

“ Without God, nothing is done upon the face of the earth.”
“Perfection consists in offering up thyself, with thy whole heart, to the will of God; never seeking thine own will either in small or great respects; but with an equal mind weighing all events in the balance of the sanctuary, and receiving both prosperity and adversity with equal thanksgiving.” ”

“ He saw far into the human heart, looked with a piercing eye through the disguises of sin, could follow with unexampled clearness the turnings and twistings and lurkings of selfishness. Though the severest of censors, he is at the same time the most pitying. ”

“ We grieve the Holy Spirit, we return to ourselves, we think it a little thing to be wanting toward God. On the other hand, true love can see nothing small; everything that can either please or displease God seems to be great. Not that true love disturbs the soul with scruples, but it puts no limit to its faithfulness; it acts simply with God; and as it does not concern itself about those things which God does not require from it, so it never hesitates an instant about those which He does, be they great or small.
True Prayer. ”

“ Our intercourse with God resembles that with a friend; at first there are a thousand things to be told and as many to be asked; but after a time these diminish, while the pleasure of being together does not. Everything has been said, but the satisfaction of seeing each other, of feeling that one is near the other, of reposing in the enjoyment of a pure and sweet friendship, can be felt without conversation ”

“ Fénelon never wearies of recommending to the correspondents whom he is instructing in spiritual things the perusal of the works of this delightful and inspiring writer. He says to one: “You can read nothing better than St. Francis of Sales. Everything he writes is full of comfort and love; although his whole tone is that of self-mortification, it is all deep experience, simple precautions, high feeling, and the light of grace. You will have made a great step when you are familiar with such mental food.” ”

“ O God, how 184 much our best friends cost us! The only solace of life is friendship, and friendship turns into irreparable grief. Let us seek the Friend who does not die, in whom we shall recover all the rest. Nothing could be deeper or truer than the virtues of him who has died. Nothing could be a greater witness of grace than was his death. I have never seen anything more lovely and edifying.... God’s will is done. He chose to seek my friend’s happiness rather than my comfort; and I should be wanting alike to God and my friend, if I did not will what He wills. ”

“ Carefully purify your conscience from daily faults; suffer no sin to dwell in your heart; small as it may seem, it obscures the light of grace, weighs down the soul, and hinders that constant communion with Jesus Christ which it should be your pleasure to cultivate; you will become lukewarm, forget God, and find yourself growing in attachment to the creature. The great point is never to act in opposition to the inward light, but be willing to go as far as God would have us. ”

“ We as Methodists, especially, believe firmly in feeling, and in a first-hand knowledge of God as the privilege of each genuine believer. We hold fast to experience as having rights which logic and dogma must respect; we have exalted life above theory, and the vision divine above dead orthodoxy; we maintain that there is a God-consciousness, as well as a self-consciousness and a world-consciousness ”

“ Both the great types of Mystics may appeal to him,—those who try to rise through the visible to the invisible, through nature to God; and those who look upon this earth as a place of banishment, upon material things as a veil which hides God’s face from us, and who bid us seek yonder in the realm of ideas the heart’s true home. ”

“ Every man holds himself in trust for his Creator, and must do his best to manifest that Creator, not necessarily according to the conception most prevalent in his immediate circle, but according to the mandate which has been laid on him. It is this thought which gives the profoundest value to his existence and lifts him above too great dependence on popular standards. And it is this thought, properly carried out, which shows how much of unreason there is in the declaration that self must be totally forgotten, renounced, annihilated. ”

“ The highest form of the Divine life in a man seemed to them to be perfect resignation to the will of God, and they counted prayer to be the best means of bringing about this state of resignation. “To pray for a change in one’s circumstances,” they said, “is to pray that what God sends may be made subject to us, not that we should submit ourselves to it; and so tends to produce self-assertion, not self-renunciation.” ”

“ Humility.
The foundation of peace with all men is humility. Pride is incompatible with pride; hence arise divisions in the world. We must stifle all rising jealousies; all little contrivances to promote our own glory; vain desires to please or to succeed, or to be praised; the fear of seeing others preferred to ourselves; the anxiety to have our plans carried into effect; the natural love of dominion and desire to influence others. ”