Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert

“ Trust in the risen Saviour—that was the belief which saved his soul.
To Him let us but cleave in all our strife; and the Tempter will flee; the wilderness will be desolate no more; angels will come and minister unto us; and when we pass from them to the ministry of life, be it to the glory of a transfiguration, the sorrows of a Gethsemane, or the sacrifice of the cross, the tranquilizing peace of God will never be far from us. ”

“ Burn up the chaff of vanity and self-indulgence, of hasty prejudice, second-hand dogmas—husks which do not feed my soul, with which I cannot be content, of which I feel ashamed daily—and if there be any grain of wheat in me, any word or thought or power of action which may be of use as seed for my nation after me, gather it, oh Lord, into Thy garner. ”

“ Speak the truth, by all means! Speak it so that no man can mistake the utterance. Be bold and fearless in your rebuke of error, and in your keener rebuke of wrong-doing; all Christ's witnesses are bound to be thus "valiant for the truth;" but be human and loving and gentle and brotherly the while. If you must deliver the Redeemer's testimony, deliver it with the Redeemer's tears. Look, straight-eyed and kindly, upon the vilest, as a man ought to look upon a man, both royal, although the one is wearing, and the other has pawned his crown. ”

“ Love is credible to a loving heart; purity is credible to a pure mind; life is credible to a spirit in which life beats strongly—it is incredible to other men.
—F. W. Robertson. In all matters of eternal truth, the soul is before the intellect; the things of God are spiritually discerned. You know truth by being true; you recognize God by being like Him.
—F. W. Robertson. We must not let go manifest truths because we cannot answer all questions about them.
—Jeremy Collier. We must never throw away a bushel of truth because it happens to contain a few grains of chaff. ”

“ It is the easiest thing in the world for us to obey God when He commands us to do what we like, and to trust Him when the path is all sunshine. The real victory of faith is to trust God in the dark, and through the dark. ”

“ Good thoughts are true wealth; they are fountains of living water; they are gems that always shine; they are impenetrable shields to protect the character; they are goodly apparel for the mind; they are right noble companions; they are fair angels of light; they are flowers of rich beauty and sweet fragrance; they are seeds of noble actions and noble institutions; they are moulds in which exalted characters are formed; they make good and great men; they are a nation's mightiest bulwarks. ”

“ Brethren, what makes a Christian is not the theology you have in your heads, but the faith and love you have in your hearts. We must, indeed, have a clear statement of truth in orderly propositions,—that is, a system of dogmas,—to have any thing to trust to at all. There can be no saving faith in an unseen Person, except through the medium of thoughts concerning Him, which thoughts put into words are a creed.
THOUGHT.
If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all? ”

“ We want to know more than the silent God deems it good to tell; to understand the "why" which He bids us wait to ask; to see the path which He has spread on purpose in the dark. The Infinite Father does not stand by us to be catechised, and explain Himself to our vain mind; He is here for our trust. ”

“ I have striven to serve Thee, I have followed in Thy path, and clung to Thy cross, and pressed forward through the many falls and many repentings—I bring Thee a heart which asks nothing save Thy grace, claims nothing save Thy Divine love ”

“ How simply I can trust in man, and how little in God! How unreasonable is a pure act of faith in one like ourselves, if we cannot repose the same faith in God.
—Richard Cecil. When God says to us, "Give me your load, trust me, what you cannot do, I will do for you," He puts our faith to one of the strongest tests. He never consents to carry our burdens unless we give them to Him. ”

“ He who seeks truth must be content with a lonely, little-trodden path. If he cannot worship her till she has been canonized by the shouts of the multitude, he must take his place with the members of that wretched crowd who shouted for two long hours, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" till truth, reason, and calmness were all drowned in noise. ”

“ Trust yourselves, my brethren, to the immortal love and perfect work of the Divine Saviour, and by His dear might your days will advance by peaceful stages, whereof each gathers up and carries forward the blessings of all that went before, to a death which shall be a birth. ”

“ In this life-long fight, to be waged by every one of us single-handed against a host of foes, the last requisite for a good fight, the last proof and test of our courage and manfulness, must be loyalty to truth—the most rare and difficult of all human qualities. ”

“ Just as soon as any conviction of important truth becomes central and vital, there comes the desire to utter it—a desire which is immediate and irresistible. Sacrifice is gladness, service is joy, when such an idea becomes a commanding power. ”

“ We sleep in peace in the arms of God when we yield ourselves up to His providence, in a delightful consciousness of His tender mercies; no more restless uncertainties, no more anxious desires, no more impatience at the place we are in, for it is God who has put us there, and who holds us in His arms. ”

“ If you tell your troubles to God, you put them into the grave; they will never rise again when you have committed them to Him. If you roll your burden anywhere else, it will roll back again like the stone of Sisyphus. ”

“ We have nothing to do but to surrender ourselves to God each day, without looking farther; He will carry us in His arms as a tender mother bears her child. Let us believe, hope, and love with all the simplicity of babes ”

“ Time, beneath whose influence the pyramids moulder into dust, and the flinty rocks decay, does not and cannot destroy a fact, nor strip a truth of one portion of its essential importance.
Truth is a very different thing from fact; it is the loving contact of the soul with spiritual fact, vital and potent. It does not work in the soul independently of all faculty or qualification there for setting it forth or defending it. Truth in the inward parts is a power, not an opinion. ”

“ It is a view of God that compensates every thing else, and enables the soul to rest in His bosom. How, when the child in the night screams with terror, hearing sounds that it knows not of, is that child comforted and put to rest? ”

“ Punishment proceeds from love to justice, not from love to the person punished; but chastisement is from love to the person chastised, though mixed with displeasure against sin.
—John Owen. What disturbs us in this world is not "trouble," but our opposition to trouble. The true source of all that frets and irritates and wears away our lives, is not in external things, but in the resistance of our wills to the will of God expressed by external things. ”

“ Can we be unsafe where He has placed us, and where He watches over us as a parent watches a child? This confiding repose, in which earthly care sleeps, is the true vigilance of the heart; yielding itself up to God, with no other support than Him, it thus watches while we sleep. ”

“ Life has no smooth road for any of us; and in the bracing atmosphere of a high aim, the very roughness only stimulates the climber to steadier and steadier stops, till that legend of the rough places fulfills itself at last, "per asfera ad astra" over steep ways to the stars. ”

“ Never should we so abandon ourselves to God as when He seems to abandon us. Let us enjoy light and consolation when it is His pleasure to give them to us; but let us not attach ourselves to His gifts, but to Him ”

“ So they may seem as they approach; but those who come hold the hands of those that go, and that troop have no rosy light upon their limbs, their garlands are faded, the sunshine falls not upon the gray and shrouded shapes, as they steal ghostlike through the gloom. ”

“ When tempted, the shortest and surest way is to act like a little child at the breast; when we show it a frightful monster, it shrinks back and buries its face in its mother's bosom, that it may no longer behold it. ”

“ The way to attain to larger gifts is to employ the gifts you have. Give Jesus the one talent, and then He may trust you with two. If you cannot speak glibly in a prayer-meeting, then stammer out your heart's thanks in the best fashion you can. It may be that your few broken words may accomplish more than another man's fluent harangues. ”

“ Men of the best intellectual abilities are apt to strike off suddenly, like the tangent of a circle, and cannot be brought into their orbits by attraction or gravity—they often act with such eccentricity as to be lost in the vortex of their own reveries. ”

“ While we would have our young sisters imitate, as they cannot fail to love, the conduct of Ruth, will not their elders do well to ponder on, and imitate the tenderness of Naomi? Would we have our daughters Ruths, we must be Naomis. ”

“ Your religious nature will finally become a virtually exterminated organ. The purpose you have at some future time to use your talent avails nothing. It is going from you, and, before you know it, will be utterly, irrevocably gone. My friends, there is not an hour to lose. Only with the greatest difficulty will you be able, now, to gather up yourself and open your closing gates to the entrance of God and His salvation. ”

“ THEOLOGY.
Of all qualities which a theologian must possess, a devotional spirit is the chief. For the soul is larger than the mind, and the religious emotions lay hold on the truths to which they are related on many sides at once. ”

“ We are to keep ourselves from opportunities, and God will keep us from sin.
Christian! thou knowest thou carriest gunpowder about thee. Desire them that carry fire to keep at a distance. It is a dangerous crisis, when a proud heart meets with flattering lips.
—John Flavel.
The devil tempts us not; 'tis we tempt him,
Beckoning his skill with opportunity.
—George Eliot. Occasions of adversity best discover how great virtue or strength each one hath. For occasions do not make a man frail, but they show what he is. ”

“ The whole duty of man is embraced in the two principles of abstinence and patience: temperance in prosperity, and courage in adversity.
—Seneca. Drinking water neither makes a man sick, nor in debt, nor his wife a widow.
—John Neal.
TEMPTATION.
God is better served in resisting a temptation to evil than in many formal prayers.
On this earth all is temptation. Crosses tempt us by irritating our pride, and prosperity by flattering it. Our life is a continual combat, but one in which Jesus Christ fights for us. ”

“ He who cannot find time to consult his Bible will one day find he has time to be sick; he who has no time to pray must find time to die; he who can find no time to reflect is most likely to find time to sin; he who cannot find time for repentance will find an eternity in which repentance will be of no avail; he who cannot find time to work for others may find an eternity in which to suffer for himself. ”

“ We cannot come before the sinless and holy Lord with a stainless and holy life. We can at best bring Him the partial offerings of years. Yes, the holiest saint shall only at the last say, "Not for my righteousness." ”

“ Let us be assured of this, that if the lesson and the rod are of His appointing, and that His all-wise love has engineered the deep tunnel of trial on the heavenward road, He will never desert us during the discipline. The vital thing for us is not to deny and desert Him. ”

“ The believer is no burden to his God, and even if you should be carrying whole mountains of care and solicitude, they will not make you more burdensome or your case more difficult to the Creator of the ends of the earth. ”

“ Stick to the old truths and the old paths, and learn their divineness by sick-beds and in every-day work, and do not darken your mind with intellectual puzzles, which may breed disbelief, but can never breed vital religion or practical usefulness. ”

“ We must pass on unmoved, while temptations rage around us, as the traveler, overtaken by a storm, simply wraps his cloak more closely about him, and pushes on more vigorously toward his destined home. ”

“ Brilliant talents in general are like the ignes fatui; they excite wonder, but often mislead. They are not, however, without their use; like the fire from the flint, once produced, it may be converted, by solid, thinking men, to very salutary and noble purposes. ”

“ Men of splendid talents are generally too quick, too volatile, too adventurous, and too unstable to be much relied on; whereas men of common abilities, in a regular, plodding routine of business, act with more regularity and greater certainty. ”

“ We cannot keep thieves from looking in at our windows, but we need not give them entertainment with open doors.
—Thomas Adams. Be not troubled by the wanderings of your imagination which you cannot restrain. How often do we wander through the fear of wandering and the regret that we have done so. ”

“ Richard Cecil. Great trials seem to be a necessary preparation for great duties. It would seem that the more important the enterprise, the more severe the trial to which the agent is subjected in his preparation. ”

“ The best general means to insure the profitable employment of our time, is to accustom ourselves to living in continual dependence upon the Spirit of God and His law, receiving, every instant, whatever He is pleased to bestow ”

“ Whether it be a poison from one serpent sting, or whether it be poison from a million of buzzing, tiny musquitoes; if there be a smart, go to Him, and He will help you bear it. He will do more, He will bear it with you; for if so be that we suffer with Him, He suffers with us. ”