“ Humanity will never, perhaps, wind itself higher. But it was a height on which human strength is insufficient to stand. There lacked a sure word of truth: the joy and fruitfulness of an inspiration: a grace which could minister to the weakness, as well as summon the forces, of human nature. We cannot be blind to its failure unless we share it: unless, that is, we are trying to satisfy ourselves by some philosophy of life which misses its secrets, has no key to many of its problems, and at heart despairs of its solution. ”

“ The willing surrender of the heart is the witness to a fact which is beyond argument, which accepts no denial, yet which is no tyrannous fate, but is a living and animating bond of blood, which it is a joy to recognise, and an inspiration to confess.
It is in such a spirit of sonship that faith reveals and realises itself. Faith is that temper of sympathetic and immediate response to Another's will which belongs to a recognised relationship of vital communion. It is the spirit of confident surrender, which can only be justified by an inner identification of life. ”

“ There is a fact of experience as old as history, as widely spread as is the human race, and more intensely, irresistibly, importunately real than all the gathered experience of art and policy and science,—the fact which philosophers call moral evil, and Christians sin. It rests upon no questionable interpretation of an Eastern allegory. We breathe it, we feel it, we commit it, we see its havoc all around us. It is no dogma, but a sad, solemn, inevitable fact. The animal creation has a law of its being, a condition of its perfection, which it instinctively and invariably pursues. ”

“ It is as far as possible from being simply a question whether 'a man' could or could not, did or did not, reappear, after death, in life. When we speak of the historical fact, we must mean at least the whole fact with all that it was and meant, complex as it was and many-sided; not with its meaning or its proof isolated upon a single page of the book of history, but having far-reaching affinities, parts essentially of its interpretation and of its evidence, entwined in the depths of the whole constitution of our nature, and the whole drama of history from the first moment to the last. ”

“ The Bible is the apology which our faith carries with it, and offers as a proof of the necessity which has forced it to go beyond its primitive efforts, until it has reached the stage at which we now encounter it. It portrays there, before our eyes, how it all began; how there came to this man and to that, the simple augury, the presage, the spasm of spiritual insight, the flash, the glimpse, the intimation; until there came the man, Abraham, in whom it won the emphasis, the solidity, the power, of a call. 'Oh! that we might be content to feel, as he, the presence of the Everlasting! ”

“ I cannot have faith without an object. Faith in Jesus Christ? But who is Jesus Christ? Is He a dead man? Is He, as a dead man, no longer in any existence? Or am I, at least, necessarily ignorant as to whether He and other dead men have any existence, actual or probable? Or is He a man indeed,—no more; and dead indeed; but, as other good men, alive after death somehow in the blessedness of God? ”

“ The man who brings this temper into play in affairs of the will, or the heart, or the imagination, in cases of affection, friendship, passion, inspiration, generosity, in the things of home, of war, of patriotism, of love, is in the wrong world: he is a living blunder: he has no cue, no key, no interpretation. He is simply absurd.
And religion stands with these affairs. Just as we see well enough that if love were approached in this scientific spirit, it could not even begin, so it is quite as certain that, if faith were approached in this spirit, it could not even begin. ”

“ It means that comparatively very few men have been at pains to realize their true freedom; that men in masses have been dominated by the mere forces of nature; or, in other words, that human history presents broadly the record of a one-sided, a distorted development. For man was not meant for merely natural evolution, mere self-adaptation to the 'things that are seen.' The consciousness that he was meant for something higher has tinged his most brilliant physical successes, his greatest triumphs of civilization and art, with the bitterness of remorse, the misery of conscious lawlessness. ”

“ Who can measure the consilient force with which, in moments of intensest thought and feeling, moments when all the besetting conditions seemed quick with some imminent disclosure, the Divine commands, meeting, illuminating, establishing those former utterances, would be riveted upon the hearts of men and clenched for ever into the faith and practice of the Church, with a dominance never to be forgotten or infringed, as a very primal law of life? ”

“ In Greece the experiment is by way of spontaneity, of free lively development, conditioned only by its own instincts of taste and beauty. And Rome represents the alternative plan of seeking strength by discipline, by subordination, by distrust of novelty, by sacrifice of individuality to the corporate life, and of sentiment and opinion to the rule of law. Both realize deathless types of matured human life, of its beauty, its brilliant graces, its dignity, its honour, its strength. ”

“ On the one side, the human life of the Word of God may be regarded as a fulfilment, the restoration of an order, marred, indeed, and broken, but never completely lost, the binding together of all truth, all goodness, all beauty, into one perfect life; on the other, it is a reversal, the beginning of a new order, the undoing of a great wrong which has eaten deep into human nature, the lifting up of mankind out of the helpless slavery of sin into the freedom of righteousness. ”

“ All human nature is not lovable: all men are not love-worthy. Love must, at least, mean a different thing; it must weaken its connotation if applied to all men; there may be pity, there may be faith, there may be a prophetic anticipating love for the sinner and the criminal, as we recall their origin and forecast the possibilities of their future; but love in the highest sense, love that delights in and admires its object, love that is sure of a response, the sense of brotherhood which knows that it can trust a brother—these are not possible with the wanton, the selfish, the hypocrite. ”

“ This, then, is the real hinge-point of the Catholic faith. But when this, the greatest of all battles of belief, is won at last, in spite of every variety of Arian and semi-Arian refining; forthwith the undisciplined mind, always ready to exaggerate, always difficult of balance, begins so to run into ardour of expression of its truth, as in effect to make unreal the other half of the doctrine of the Incarnation. The first great wonder once grasped, it is so natural, in fervour of insistance on the very Godhead, to forget or deny the simple completeness of the very Manhood! ”

“ It is the name of an emotion rather than a creed; that indescribable mystic emotion which the poet, the artist, the man of science, and all their kindred feel in contemplating the beauty or the wonder of the world. Vague as it is, and indefinite, this sentiment is still one of the strongest of which our nature is susceptible, and should be recognised, as an integral element in all true religion. Yet for want of such recognition on the part of Christians it is often allowed to gravitate nearer and nearer to pure Pantheism, with which it has, in reality, no essential affinity. ”

“ Must we wonder through days and months, yes, and through years perhaps of dim and desolate bewilderment, whether it was a real presence that came to us; with nothing but the fading memory of an individual and unconfirmed impression to sustain our hope, to keep the door against the gathering forces of doubt and worldliness and despair? Must we find our way as best we can, by guidance given long ago, imperfectly realized even then, and more and more hazily remembered, more drearily inadequate as time goes on, and the path grows rougher and less clear? ”

“ Religion is the effort to arrive at that Name, in its separable identity, in its personal and distinct significance. It is the fulfilment of the unceasing cry 'Tell me Thy name!' In religion we are engaged in the age-long task of lifting the Name, clear and high, above the clang and roar of its works, that through and by means of all that He is, we may pierce through to the very God of gods, and may close with Him in the blessed solitude of a love which knits heart to heart and spirit to spirit, without any withholding interval, with no veil to hinder or intervene. ”

“ Only by thinking, can it be known what thought is: only by feeling can it be understood what is meant by a feeling: only by seeing, willing, loving, can we have the least conception of sight, or of will, or of love.
And faith stands with these primary intuitions. It is deeper and more elemental than them all: and, therefore, still less than they can it admit of translation into other conditions than its own;—can still less submit itself to public observation. It can never be looked at from without. It can be known only from within itself. Belief is only intelligible by believing. ”

“ Even though with the growth of morality, and the fuller unfolding of the character of God, there came, like a shadow cast by light, the deepening consciousness of sin as the barrier between man and God, the Jew refused to believe that the separation was for ever. Sin was a disease which needed healing, a bondage which called for a deliverer, a state of indebtedness from which man could not free himself. But Israel believed in and looked forward to, with confidence and hope, the Redeemer who should come to Zion and save His people from their sins. ”

“ We all know the bitterness of a breach which scatters a family into fragments: and that is but a faint shadow of all which the great Father sees to be involved in the broken contact between Himself and His son. What standard have we by which to sound the abyss of divine disappointment, as God waits ready with gift upon gift of endless grace which He will pour out upon the child of His love, as the endless years open out new wonders of advancing intimacy ”

“ If men full of worldliness of heart and self-indulgence could be capable of understanding the revelation of religious truth as accurately, of embracing it as completely, of apprehending the depth and the width of the evidence for it (with which all human nature really is saturated) as thoroughly as the prayerful and the penitent, this would not mean that religion or religious evidence had been lifted up, on to a higher and more properly scientific level, but rather that it had shrunk down into correspondence merely with a part, and not the noblest part, of man's present nature. ”

“ So far from being a mark of inconsistency or feebleness, it is a necessary note of the completeness of religion. Religion professes to have for its subject-matter, and in a measure incomplete, but relatively adequate, to include, to account for, and to direct, the whole range of all man's history, all man's capacities, explored or unexplored, all man's destiny now and for ever. If its truths and their evidence were found to address themselves exclusively to the intellect, in isolation from the other qualities and experiences of man's nature, it would be self-convicted of inadequacy. ”

“ For it is hardly too much to say that in one or other of its various aspects, every human being has need of suffering for the due development of his character. And this is a fact which should go far to outweigh much brilliant declamation of the pessimists. Pessimism, in fact, stereotypes and gives a fictitious permanence to what is only one among our many moods of thought. It harps upon the fact that we naturally shrink from pain. It ignores the fact that we are conscious of being the better for it, and unable to conceive progress without it. ”

“ At the end, as at the beginning, of all the argumentative work, it is still the temper of a child which they must bring into play. There must still be the energy of self-committal,—the movement of a brave surrender. Once let them turn, enforced by all the pressure of reasonable evidence, to this secret fount of life within the self, and back flows the strength which was theirs long ago, when the inspiration of their innate sonship moved sweetly in them, breeding confidence, secure of itself, undaunted, and unfatigued. That sonship abides in us all, cumbered and clouded though it be by our sin ”

“ Christianity claims to be in contact with facts; such facts as sin, moral impotence, perverted will, the tyranny of habit. And while she is large-hearted and eagle-spirited in her scope—dealing with all possible relationships in which a human being may stand, whether to God above him, his fellow-men about him, or the sum of physical life below him; the Church is none the less definite and practical in method and aim; witness the importance she attaches to the individual character, the recreation of which is at least a step towards a regeneration of society. ”

“ Personality enables man to be receptive of a message and a call from God. It confers on each possessor of it an absolute dignity and worth. Personality—here is our crucial fact; enabling us to take a just measure of man, and of our duty towards him. One of the deepest truths brought to light by the Gospel was the value of the personal life, of the single soul, in God's sight. Man is great, not merely because he thinks, and can recognise moral relationships and obligations; but chiefly because he was created for union with God; and was destined to find blessedness and perfection in Him alone. ”