Percy Dearmer

“ Yet if religious people showed the characteristic fruits of the Spirit, how popular they would be!
The truth is that Christianity is very difficult for us all. 'How very hard it is', wrote Browning in a burst of simplicity, 'to be a Christian!' So far from being an old-fashioned religion, it is so blazingly modern that we have only begun to touch it here and there. ”

“ And as Might is not the headlong dashing into obstacles, or the ferocious determination to have one's own way, so it is not mere fortitude either—it is more than the power of patient resistance, and to render it only as fortitude under adversity is to rob it of its highest quality. To weigh and then to act, to balance with perfect judgement and then to perform with resistless energy and courage—that is Counsel and Might. ”

“ The gifts are given to every man in his degree, and the Holy Spirit is in each one of us. Each of us has some desire for truth, for goodness, for beauty, and some appreciation of them, some instinct that they are the more excellent things which cannot be explained— because they are themselves the explanation. Each, of us in some degree has counsel, and in some measure puts forth power. Each of us is inspired.
Wisdom, understanding, and knowledge are our life, and the Spirit comes to give it us more abundantly. ”

“ The emotional aspects of love vary much, but sacrifice is the test of its reality: where a mother will die for her child, a man for his friend, a martyr for his faith, or a boy for his country, there at least is love, since there is death. Love is the nature of God, and his very Being, the explanation of his Person, the cause of creation, the key to all mysteries, and the test of all action. Love is the beginning, and love is the end, the source of all life, and the meaning of life. ”

“ THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT
Christianity is war: it is also peace confidence and happiness as well as onslaught and struggle; meditation as well as sacrifice. The gift of the Spirit is indeed the gift of Christ—not peace, but a sword; but, and therein lies the paradox of his infinite range, the gift is also the quiet flow of wisdom. Inspiration is not only enthusiasm ”

“ We need not be afraid of becoming too ecclesiastical; our fault is that we are never ecclesiastical enough, but are content to say in our hearts that we believe in our own church, and some cognate organizations, instead of in that universal brotherhood and kingdom which is the mother of us all.
The Holy Ghost is the Spirit of holy individualism, the Spirit of Liberty, moving men to struggle against both secular and ecclesiastical domination, whether it works by persecution or by bribery. ”

“ To class it with reverence as the knowledge of God would make no ultimate difference to its meaning; for to know God is to know truth. The scientist, as well as the artist and the saint, owes his gift to the Spirit of God. All truth is sacred and only falsehood is secular. The obscurantist divine is an adversary of the Holy Ghost, and the open-minded scholar a servant of the Holy Ghost. Knowledge is the power of appreciating Truth.
But the saint, the artist, the scholar, like the statesman or the general, represent only the highest examples of common human activity. ”

“ The Holy Ghost is also the Spirit of holy fellowship, the Spirit of Charity, which moves men to love one another— and for that end, to get to know one another not only within their own fragments of the broken body of Christ, but among those also which are alien to them. Our modern era has seen the Liberty of the Spirit spreading over the world; and now, after four centuries of struggle, we know ourselves to be at the beginning of a movement towards a new Fellowship of the Spirit. ”

“ Instead of being only the description of a strong and just ruler, an exceptional man, indeed a unique man—the liberating Messiah whom the Jews longed for—the description now becomes that of the ordinary Christian. Every one is expected to show these ruling qualities, just because he is a Christian. Here then is the banner of democracy unfurled, ages before it had come into practical politics! Democracy has as a matter of fact always followed in the wake of Christianity, and has never existed in any but Christian nations. ”

“ We all must, during the years of struggle for freedom, have imagined sometimes the horrible difficulty of our marshals, admirals, presidents, and prime ministers, the agonizing process of making some irrevocable decision; and, as we watched the gradual unfolding of the plans of Marshal Foch, we must have realized the quality of real power, how courage is needed for right counsel, not less than for right action, how the highest form of power is after all intellectual as well as moral, and how inseparable in all right undertaking are Counsel and Might. ”

“ Love, I take it, does begin with that 'feeling of being in a wider life', love both to God and to Man; and for the rest love cannot be defined—it can only be sung about. The general character of S. Paul's list suggests that it is not so much love to God that is here meant, as a state of Charity, springing from love to God, dwelling in it, and extending itself to all living creatures. The heart is melted and the heart is on fire. The barriers of self are broken down, and we have an absorbing interest in, and an intense affection for, all that is outside self—supremely for God. ”

“ Is not this most truly religion, whatever else it may be? Yet human war is unchristian, devilish, loathsome. How can these things be? Why is the appeal of battle so universal, so deep in the human heart, that nations riven by dissension become as one man, and men the most diverse agree in the one cause? ”

“ She exists not only to realize brotherhood within her own borders, which she has yet to do; but to promote the brotherhood of all mankind, which she has done from the beginning, and is still doing—till to-day we dream, and hardly dare to dream, that the first stage of her task is being accomplished. So the Spirit of God, with sighs that cannot be uttered, will not rest till the World is the Church, and all the kingdoms of the world are become the kingdom of Christ, and the whole world is mighty and wise, and tender with charity. ”

“ But the object of Christ is not merely to produce saints, since his love is to all men, and not only to exceptional men. The exceptional men can take care of themselves; they will become saints in spite of what the ministers of their religions may have taught them: but the interest of Christ is chiefly in the ordinary people, even most of all, and most actively, in those who are lost, who have dropped out and been forgotten, and have missed their way. We often say that Christianity can be proved to be the best religion by the exceptional saints it produces. ”

“ I think it is true to say that, whenever we trace our ideas of the work of God's Spirit back to the origins, we find the same phenomenon. 'Out of the strong has come forth sweetness': there is abundance of honey now because the lion is dead. 'Blessed be the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, who strengtheneth us all,' says the very ancient Ethiopic Liturgy: 'And his the gentle voice we hear,' says the modern hymn. ”

“ But the Church is at war with all things worth fighting against, with all things hateful and strong, with dragons and beasts and devils, with the cruel and careless and proud, with ignorance and vice and oppression, with the demon within and the demon without, with Mammon and with Babylon; and her warfare is an Apocalypse, as it was in the first days, of awful horsemen and hosts armoured with fire and jacinth, of the Dragon and the Beast, of Michael and his war, of trumpets and voices and thunders and smoke. ”

“ We are still the Primitive Church; we have not even as yet arrived at the simplest system of organization which can hold us all together. We have not yet formed a society; but are still tearing through history like robber-bands, intent on capture, and firing at one another. The world takes up arms occasionally; the Church fights all the time.
Still less have we arrived at the practice of the Christian virtues. The Sermon on the Mount is, as an English bishop once frankly proclaimed, impracticable in Christendom, if not undesirable. ”

“ Without charity they are nothing worth.
The Fruits of the Spirit, the plenitude of Charity, are the test of the Christian; for a strong man may have the princely virtues in an exceptional degree, and be a pagan ”

“ I may distribute all I possess in charity, I may give up my body to be burnt, but if I have no love, I make nothing of it. Love is very patient, very kind. Love knows no jealousy; love makes no parade, gives itself no airs, is never rude, never selfish, never irritated, never resentful; love is never glad when others go wrong, love is gladdened by goodness, always slow to expose, always eager to believe the best, always hopeful, always patient.' Then he goes on to say that prophesying, and glossolaly, and knowledge will be superseded when that which is perfect comes ”

“ War is most horrible. But one thing is worse— unrighteous peace, the peace of selfishness, carelessness, luxury, injustice, the peace of the oppressor and of the men who grind the faces of the poor; and one thing only is better—the peace of God, which is itself a war, a ceaseless spiritual war against unrighteousness and all the lies 'that comfort cruel men'. ”

“ Our only consolation is that the meaning of the word 'love' has certainly been greatly extended and heightened in the process. But we have no proper word for the love between God and man, and no word for the love of humanity —unless we can agree to recover 'charity' by a rigid refusal to use it of 'almsgiving' except 'philanthropy', a word the mere savour of which shows what we have made of it. And neither of these has a verb! A Christian has two duties—to love God and to love his neighbour—but he has not yet invented a proper verb to describe either action. ”

“ There is a sense, of course, in which love is at once the first cause and the crowning effect of our spiritual life, because God is love; but this does not affect our point of view, since all is from Love, and in Love, and to Love.
We have only to think of these Nine Fruits of the Spirit to realize that they are of quite a different quality when exhibited by a strong or passionate nature. They can all exist in a kindly weak person, but they are then as different as a crab-apple is from a pippin. ”

“ This corporate inspiration of the community that was destined to battle its way through the centuries, seems to have been S. Paul's crowning belief in the work of the Spirit. Every member of the society has his own gift and his own function, but all are organically united in the Church which is the body of Christ, 'the fullness of him who is being fulfilled, all things in all [10] .' All are brought, however far they may have come, to be fellow citizens with the saints, and are built together for a habitation of God in the Spirit. ”

“ Christianity can only be proved to be the best religion by its sinners.
It is by what Christianity does for the ordinary man that it must be tested—nay, by its impress also upon the customs of ordinary society, by the extent to which it gets its principles of brotherhood and charity incorporated into laws and methods of government, and compulsory social practice, into international practice and the law of nations. ”

“ Christianity had found the 'moral equivalent of war', long before William James asked for it.
Men, after all, only want to be men. They want the strong simple things, they want comradeship; and they want the fire of the Spirit to burn at white heat sometimes. ”

“ It is a fellowship, and because it is a real fellowship it is not afraid to desire the perfect organization of fellowship in all departments of life, because fellowship without organization is a mockery which cannot endure. As yet it has not succeeded in organizing itself, except in disunited fragments; but the Christian spirit has set itself from the beginning against the anarchic principle of mere individual salvation and self-culture; it has always struggled hard for the ideal, and has made magnificent experiments, which have almost succeeded, and the fruit of which is not lost. ”

“ This is surely rather unscientific: none of the gifts are miraculous, though some are psychic, and some of these rarer than others; while all the nine are moral in so far as they are well used. Is not the suggestion also rather complacent? We seem to congratulate ourselves that, because we leave almost dormant the great boon of mental healing, and because our tame lives show hardly any signs of psychic power; and because our plethora of Sunday sermons is fatal to the very spirit of prophecy, therefore we have made some indefinable growth in moral excellence since the time of S. Paul. ”

“ Christian people forget that angels are spirits, because art has so long materialized them with armour and vestments, and with wings constructed in defiance of the laws both of flight and of anatomy. Now, angels must be spirits; and a guardian angel would really be, not like the beautifully draped lady of nineteenth-century art, but much more like the daemon, the δαιμόνιον, of Socrates, which, although according to Xenophon and Plato it was neither a divinity nor a genius, appeared to the philosopher as a warning voice, which he heard frequently with his outward ear, and never disobeyed. ”