Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert

“ Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.
—Petrarch.
Love is a passion
Which kindles honor into noble acts.
—Dryden. Joy is love exulting; peace is love in repose; long-suffering is love on trial; gentleness is love in society; goodness is love in action; faith is love on the battle-field; meekness is love at school; and temperance is love in training. ”

“ We, too, must enter into the Saviour's sorrow. For us, if we believe in Him, He breaks the bread, and pours the wine; and when we eat and drink, we do show the Lord's death until He come. His death, not His life, though that was lustrous with a holiness without the shadow of a stain. His death, not His teaching, though that embodied the fullness of a wisdom that was Divine. His death, not His miracles, though His course was a march of mercy, and in His track of blessing the world rejoiced and was glad. ”

“ Love is the foundation of all obedience. Without it morality degenerates into mere casuistry. Love is the foundation of all knowledge. Without it religion degenerates into a chattering about Moses and doctrines and theories; a thing that will neither kill nor make alive, that never gave life to a single soul or blessing to a single heart, and never put strength into any hand in the conflict and strife of daily life. ”

“ There is no life so meager that the greatest and wisest of us can afford to despise it. We cannot know at what moment it may flash forth with the life of God.
—Phillips Brooks. Life is rather a state of embryo, a preparation for life; a man is not completely born till he has passed through death.
—Franklin. Brethren, it is the prismatic halo and ring of eternity round this poor glass of time that gives it all its dignity, all its meaning. The lives that are lived before God cannot be trifles. ”

“ Of the systems above us, angelic and seraphic, we know little; but we see one law, simple, efficient, and comprehensive as that of gravitation,—the law of love,—extending its sway over the whole of God's dominions, living where He lives, embracing every moral movement in its universal authority, and producing the same harmony, where it is obeyed as we observe in the movements of nature.
—Mark Hopkins. The love that gushes for all is the real elixir of life—the fountain of bodily longevity. It is the lack of this that always produces the feeling of age. ”

“ The moment you accept God's ordering, that moment your work ceases to be a task, and becomes your calling; you pass from bondage to freedom, from the shadow-land of life Into life itself.
—H. Clay Trumbull. Not until right is founded upon reverence, will it be secure; not until duty is based upon love, will it be complete; not until liberty is based on eternal principles, will it be full, equal, lofty, and universal.
—Henry Giles. The great comprehensive truths, written on every page of our history, are these: Human happiness has no perfect security but freedom; freedom none but virtue ”

“ But he may work grudgingly, or he may work gratefully; he may work as a man, or he may work as a machine. He cannot always choose his work, but he can do it in a generous temper, and with an up-looking heart. There is no work so rude, that he may not exalt it; there is no work so impassive, that he may not breathe a soul into it; there is no work so dull, that he may not enliven it. ”

“ Consider that as a principle of love is the main principle in the heart of a real Christian, so the labor of love, is the main business of the Christian life.
—Jonathan Edwards. True love goes ever straight forward, not in its own strength, but esteeming itself as nothing. Then indeed we are truly happy. The cross is no longer a cross when there is no self to suffer under it. ”

“ And thus does life go on, until death accomplishes the catastrophe in silence, takes the worn frame within his hand, and, as if it were a dried-up scroll, crumbles it in his grasp to ashes. The monuments of kingdoms, too, shall disappear. ”

“ Jesus is mine.
—Horatius Bonar. Pure love is in the will alone; it is no sentimental love, for the imagination has no part in it; it loves, if we may so express it, without feeling, as faith believes without seeing. ”

“ The law of God is not the conflict of will with will, but of wisdom with folly, knowledge with ignorance, right with wrong—the announcement out of parental love, of the conditions of spiritual life, happiness, immortality. The punishment of sin, therefore, may be contemplated, not as the overflowing of wrath, but the outworkings of natural law, coincident with the judgment of infinite righteousness. ”

“ Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world: all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempt from her power. ”

“ Labor is not, as some have erroneously supposed, a penal clause of the original curse. There was labor, bright, healthful, unfatiguing, in unfallen Paradise. By sin, labor became drudgery—the earth was restrained from her spontaneous fertility, and the strong arm of the husbandman was required, not to develop, but to "subdue" it. But labor in itself is noble, and is necessary for the ripe unfolding of the highest life. ”

“ It is intended that we shall accomplish all, through law, that we can accomplish for ourselves. God gives every bird its food, but does not throw it into the nest. He does not unearth the good that the earth contains, but He puts it in our way, and gives us the means of getting it ourselves.
—J. G. Holland. Blessed is the man who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. Know thy work, and do it; and work at it like Hercules. One monster there is in the world, the idle man.
—Thomas Carlyle. God does not give excellence to men but as the reward of labor. ”

“ What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils, for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
—Edmund Burke. That religion which holds that all men are equal in the sight of the great Father will not refuse to acknowledge that all citizens are equal in the sight of the law. ”

“ It gives to industry a noble, contented look which selfish drudgery never wore; and from the moment that a man begins to do his work for his Saviour's sake, he feels that the most ordinary employments are full of sweetness and dignity, and that the most difficult are not impossible. And if any of you, my friends, is weary with his work, if dissatisfaction with yourself or sorrow of any kind disheartens you, if at any time you feel the dull paralysis of conscious sin, or the depressing influence of vexing thoughts, look to Jesus, and be happy. Be happy, and your joyful work will prosper well. ”

“ To love God, we must know Him as manifested in Christ,—know Him as incarnated in human form,—know Him as revealing His holiness, His tenderness, His pity, His yearning love, and condescending grace, in the suffering, glorified Redeemer. ”

“ Alexander Maclaren. Our yearnings are homesicknesses for heaven; our sighings are for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, know not that they sob for their parents. ”

“ We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under Thy table. But Thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of Thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink His blood, that our sinful souls and bodies may be made clean by His death, and washed through His most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in Him, and He in us. ”

“ When a man is told that the whole of religion and morality is summed up in the two commandments, to love God, and to love our neighbor, he is ready to cry, like Charoba in Gebir, at the first sight of the sea, "Is this the mighty ocean? ”

“ Your participation of the holy communion must be regarded as the fresh act of your espousals, as the solemn renewal of your covenant; as your surrender, entire and unhesitating, to the service of the Lord. It is thus that you confess Christ, and witness of Him to the world. If you eat and drink without discerning this great purpose, you eat and drink unworthily; if you repudiate such purpose, either in thought or act, you crucify in your measure the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame. ”

“ If we would gain light either on the theory or the practice of religion: 1. We must sincerely desire the light. 2. We must use the light we already have. 3. We must patiently seek light in the double way of prayer and rational inquiry. Never, as long as the world stands, will any religiously benighted soul thus patiently desire and pray and labor for the break of day, without at last seeing the eyelids of the morn unsealed, and the painfully dusky east gradually redden into the sun. ”

“ Labor is a curse until communion with God in it, which is possible through Jesus Christ, makes it a blessing and a joy. Christ, in the sweat of His brow, won our salvation; and our work only becomes great when it is work done in, and for, and by Him. ”

“ To be like Christ in His love is far more than to be like Him in His knowlege, if we were forced to choose between them; but they harmonize and strengthen each other; more knowledge will help us to love more; and more love help us to know more. ”

“ God be thanked for books! they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levelers. They give to all who will faithfully use them the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. ”

“ Law, meaning obedience to a holy God, passes by a natural transition into the gospel; that is, reverential duty to a person, to the obedience of love at last, which obeys, because the beautifulness of obedience is perceived. ”

“ The incarnation of God in Christ reveals this truth, that the love that seeks and saves the lost is a love that suffers. On the one side there is loss, Gethsemane and the rugged burden of Golgotha, but on the other is gain, the gain of a world's redemption. ”

“ The soul that rightly receives Christ is in a longing condition; never did the hart pant for the water brooks, never did the hireling desire the shadow, never did a condemned person long for a pardon more than the soul longs for Christ.
—John Flavel. A living man must have a living God, or his soul will perish in the midst of earthly plenty, and will thirst and die whilst the water of earthly delights is running all around him. We are made to need persons not things. ”

“ A beautiful literature springs from the depth and fullness of intellectual and moral life, from an energy of thought and feeling, to which nothing, as we believe, ministers so largely as enlightened religion. ”

“ The feeling of life's nothingness argues a mind capable of heavenly grandeur, and if capable, then made for it.
There is no life so humble that, if it be true and genuinely human and obedient to God, it may not hope to shed some of His light. ”

“ There are no trifles in the moral universe of God. Speak me a word to-day;—it shall go ringing on through the ages.
—Wm. M. Punshon. My brother, life is all great. Life is great because it is the aggregation of littles. As the chalk cliffs that rear themselves hundreds of feet above the crawling sea beneath, are all made up of the minute skeletons of microscopic animalculæ; so life, mighty and awful as having eternal consequences, life that towers beetling over the sea of eternity, is made up of these minute incidents, of these trifling duties, of these small tasks ”

“ What, then, is the individual, or what even is the race in the sublime recurrings of Time? Years, centuries, cycles, are nothing to these. The sun that measures out the ages of our planet is not a second-hand on the great dial of the universe. ”

“ One of the best things in the gospel of Jesus is the stress it lays on small things. It ascribes more value to quality than to quantity; it teaches that God does not ask how much we do, but how we do it. ”

“ Every event and condition of life is a lesson which is to be turned to account to make us more worthy of Him who by suffering was made perfect—who Himself entered not into glory, till first He had suffered pain. ”

“ Those who are weak in grace dwell more upon their sins than upon the Saviour; more upon their misery than upon free grace and mercy; more upon that which may feed their fears than upon that which may strengthen their faith; more upon the cross than the crown.
One of Satan's devices to keep poor souls in a sad, doubting, and questioning condition is causing them to be always posing and musing upon sin; to mind their sins more than their Saviour: yea, so to mind their sins as to forget and neglect their Saviour. ”

“ From the hour of the invention of printing, books, and not kings, were to rule the world. Weapons forged in the mind, keen-edged, and brighter than a sunbeam, were to supplant the sword and battle-axe. ”

“ We do not come to the Lord's Supper to testify thereby that we are perfect and righteous in ourselves; but on the contrary considering that we seek our life out of ourselves in Jesus Christ, we acknowledge that we lie in the midst of death. ”

“ While we seek to fill up life in a way that will best secure the ends of our existence here, our whole plan and course of action should be such as will not hinder but serve our preparation for a future world. ”