William Arnot

“ If any struggles are made against the encircling net during the slow, solemn process of drawing—any efforts on the part of the captives to leap out into freedom, they are made, not by one kind in displeasure at being shut up with another, but by every kind indifferently in displeasure at being shut up at all. Like the indefinite terror of mute fishes when they feel the net coming closer in, is the instinctive alarm of human beings when the hand of death is felt gradually contracting the space in which the pulses of life are permitted to play. ”

“ Forgiving, enduring love alone is sweet and blissful; it enjoys peace and the consciousness of God’s favour. By forgiving, it gives away and annihilates the injury. It treats the injurer as if he had not injured, and therefore feels no more the smart and sting that he had inflicted. Forgiveness is a shield from which all the fiery darts of the wicked one harmless rebound. Forgiveness brings heaven to earth, and heaven’s peace into the sinful heart. Forgiveness is the image of God, the forgiving Father, and an advancement of Christ’s kingdom in the world. ”

“ Worldly cares nursed by indulgence into a dangerous strength are further like thorns growing in a corn field, in that they interpose a veil between the face of Jesus and the opening, trustful look of a longing soul. It is the want of free, habitual exposure to the Sun of righteousness that prevents the ripening of grace in Christians. Unless we turn our eye often upward, and expose the struggling, springing seed of faith to the beams of the Redeemer’s love, there will be no steady growth of grace, and no ultimate fruit of righteousness. ”

“ A man has joy in his possession, and lives without God in the world: he is a god unto himself. He cannot and will not surrender his joy, such as it is, to any summons except to that which a greater joy sends in. When the preciousness of peace with God through the blood of Christ is revealed to him, the “joy thereof” becomes so great that all his gold becomes dross, and all his fine gold dim in his own esteem. This new joy is so weighty that it tosses up the scale in which all his former delights lay, as if they were only the small dust of the balance. ”

“ But the Judge of the quick and the dead, though likened to a stone as to crushing power, is not like a stone in its silent still inertia. He liveth and abideth for ever. He bears now,—has borne long. The Almighty God does not move himself to hurt those who are his enemies, any more than the rock which has slept half buried in the valley many thousand years. But he will not thus bear for ever: he will come to judge the world. He will come as the lightning comes: then blessed will all be who shall have put their trust in him, while he waited, through the Gospel, to be gracious. ”

“ Never to human eye did the seed seem smaller than at the coming of Christ. The infant in the manger at Bethlehem is like a mustard-seed—an atom scarcely perceptible in the hand, and lost to view when it falls into the earth. Yet there lay the seed of eternal life—thence sprang the stem on which all the saved of mankind shall grow as branches. Israel was feeble among the nations—a little child writhing in the grasp of imperial Rome; Judea and Galilee, with the heathenish Samaria between, constituted his beat throughout the brief period of his public ministry. ”

“ Rich and poor have in this matter no room and no right to cast stones at each other. Pinching want and luxurious profusion are, indeed, two widely diverse species of thorns; but when favoured by circumstances they are equally rank in their growth and equally effective in destroying the precious seed.
In two distinct aspects thorns, growing in a field of wheat, reflect as a mirror the kind of spiritual injury which the cares and pleasures of the world inflict when they are admitted into the heart: they exhaust the soil by their roots, and overshadow the corn with their branches. ”

“ Ah, when a soul feels sin’s power a bondage, and sin’s presence a loathsome defilement;—when a soul so oppressed flees to the Saviour for deliverance, the Lord will entertain the case, and grant redress. He will avenge. “The God of peace will bruise Satan under your feet shortly.”
No cry that rises from earth to heaven sounds so sweetly in the ear of God as the cry for vengeance upon the enemy of souls. When there is peace between man and his destroyer, the closet is silent, and no groan of distress from the deep beats against the gate of heaven. This is not what Jesus loves. ”

“ As in providence not a sparrow falls to the ground without our Father’s permission and regard, so in the new covenant not a tear falls for sin indulged, not a sigh rises for deliverance from its pollution, without attracting the notice and obtaining the approval of the Sinner’s Friend. Love, burning as a night lamp silently in a penitent’s breast, or bursting forth in impetuous praise, or calmly supplying the motive power of a useful life—love in the heart of the forgiven sinner, serves and pleases the forgiving Redeemer. ”

“ In its beginning the kingdom of evil was small; but from that small seed a mighty tree has grown.18
As there is no sin so great that the blood of Christ cannot blot it out, so there is no sin so small that it cannot destroy a soul. A little sin is like a little fire: stand in awe of the spark, and rest not till it is quenched. As Christ our Lord is tenderly careful of spiritual life when it is feeble, and cherishes it into strength, we should sternly stamp out evil while it is yet young in our own hearts, lest it spread like a fire. ”

“ Free thinking, free living brother, if I saw you about to put to sea in a ship which I knew to be affected with dry-rot in the timbers of the bottom, I would warn you with all my energy, that I might save your life: when I see you preparing to launch into eternity leaning on a lie, I cry vehemently, Beware, lest you be lost for ever! ”

“ We might be put on our guard against this species of deceit in the highest matters, by observing how readily we glide into it, in things of smaller moment. Deceits of every shade, from the lie direct to the most attenuated equivocation, spring in the complicated intercourse of modern society, like weeds in a moist summer on a fallow field. Assuredly, unless our hand be diligent in digging out these bitter roots, we shall not grow rich in the graces of the Spirit. You are invited to a neighbour’s house: you don’t like to go, and you determine that you will not go. ”

“ A great rock is lying on the plain: the cultivators have ploughed and the cattle have grazed round it since the flood. Standing beside it, and reverting to its possible history, you give scope to your imagination and ask, What if it had fallen, or should yet fall on me? The bare conception makes you shudder: you are fain to shake off the reverie and compose yourself by the reflection that the rock, fixed to the spot by the laws of nature, cannot move to harm you. ”

“ These two things go always in company, and together make up the new man—they are the new heart and the new life.
The grieved father would weep for joy, as he looked up the precipitous hill-side on which the terraced vineyard hung, and saw there the head and hands of his son glancing quickly from place to place among the vine plants. Thus there is joy in heaven—deep in the heart of heaven’s Lord—over one sinner that repenteth. Among the vines that day work was worship: the resulting act of obedience—fruit of repentance in the soul, was an offering of a sweet-smelling savour unto God. ”

“ Ever since scientific observation discovered the true system of the material universe, and so, as it were, changed those twinkling sparks of light into central suns, the rulers of tributary worlds, philosophy apart from faith has been, more or less articulately, scattering the question, at once a fruit and a seed of unbelief, How could the Creator of so vast a universe bestow so much of his care on one small spot? ”

“ When he came to himself, that disciple, afflicted sore but comforted again, clearly saw and gladly sang the mercy and judgment joined together that had cleared the room for Christ in his heart. But examples of an opposite experience, here and there one, stand on the edge of life’s crowded highway, ghastly as the pillar of salt on the plain of Sodom, burning into the soul of the passenger the warning word, “Be in time.” An old man has, by the hand of the Lord in providence, been stripped of all his treasures. ”

“ Your time, your memory, your imagination, your affections, your thoughts, late and early,—all that constitutes your life, instead of being devoted first to the kingdom of God and his righteousness, are usurped and absorbed by the things that perish in the using. When you betake yourself to the word, to prayer, to communion, your heart, already searched, drained, scourged by the greedy roots of rank earthly lusts, is a sapless, impoverished, shrivelled thing, where faith in God and loving obedience to his law can no longer grow. ”

“ The intellectual and spiritual life of an age will wither, if it has nothing wherewith to sustain itself, but the food which grew in an earlier era; it must live on the fruits that grow in its own time, and under its own eye.
Nor will a servile imitation of the ancient masters suffice. A mere reproduction, for example, of the Puritan theology would not be suitable in our day; while the truth, which constitutes its essence, remains the same, it must be cast in the moulds of modern thought, and tinged with the hues of modern experience. ”

“ I scarcely know in the whole range of nature an analogy more true and touching than this. When you allow that the angels cast and draw the net as well as divide its contents, the incongruities disappear, and the picture starts into life, true to the original. The fishes, enclosed within the net when it is first thrown out, but still swimming in the sea, not aware that the net is round them, are intensely like a human generation, with the sentence of death hanging over them, yet living and moving freely, and looking for many days. ”

“ It is thus that the Good Shepherd knows the flock. Knowing all, he misses any one that wanders. He missed a world when it fell, although his worlds lie scattered like grains of golden dust on the blue field of heaven,—the open infinite. ”

“ Far from being oppressed by the burden of his strayed sheep, the shepherd rejoices when he feels its weight upon his shoulder. His joy begins not when the work is over, but when the work begins. While the lost one is on his shoulder, and because it is on his shoulder, the shepherd is glad. The doctrinal equivalent of this feature is one of the clearest of revealed truths, and yet it is one of the last that a human heart is willing to receive. The work of saving, far from being done with a grudge in order to keep a covenant, is a present delight to the Saviour. ”

“ Soon the stewardship will be taken from us. “When ye fail,”—that is, when we can no longer retain our hold of time and life; when flesh and heart are failing; when a mist comes over the eye, so that it can no longer see the circle of weeping friends that stand round the bed of death,—have we an everlasting habitation ready to receive the departing spirit? ”

“ We give ourselves over with our whole souls in those first days of love. We have found heaven; we have seen it opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of man. But this condition does not endure. The fightings begin from within and from without, and the flame is quenched. The heart becomes cold and empty. The life of faith becomes silent and slow in its course. We become languid in watching and prayer ”

“ The grass that gets no other light grows slim and pithless, bearing no seed-knot on its slender top. Sunlight admitted now and then through apertures in the leafy awning is not sufficient for the processes of nature; the grain field must get its bosom opened without impediment permanently to the sun. It is thus that snatches of spiritual exercise do not avail to promote the growth, or even to preserve the life of grace in a heart that in the main is habitually overshadowed by a crowd of overgrown imperious worldly cares. ”

“ Ere the ransomed sinner has risen from his knees or wiped his tears away;—ere he has had time to sing a hymn or sit down at the communion table on earth, the Lord in heaven, feeling life flowing from himself into that living soul, rejoices already in the fact, and calls upon his friends, whether the spirits of just men or angels unfallen, or both in concert, to participate in his joy. ”

“ The impassable gulf between the saved and the outcast in eternity is a dreadful sight; it was the compassionate Jesus who drew aside the curtain and exposed it to view, and it was his great love that moved him to make this revelation. There is a line that crosses our path a little way forward from the spot where we stand to-day—a line that divides our time from our eternity—invisible to our eyes, but known unto God. We never know as we advance what step of the journey will carry us over this line. ”

“ It does not follow, however, that a contribution to the literature of theology is useless, because it neither touches a new theme, nor treats an old more ably.
The literature of one century, whether sacred or common, will not, when served up in the lump, satisfy the craving and sustain the life of another. The nineteenth century must produce its own literature, as it raises its own corn, and fabricates its own garments. The intellectual and spiritual treasures of the past should indeed be reverently preserved and used; but they should be used as seed. ”

“ He, the Holy One, took sin into his bosom, that he might quench it in his own embrace. It was sin that summoned the Saviour to the world, and gave shape to the Gospel of God. To the devil’s wile in Eden, as the occasion, though not the cause, unfallen angels and ransomed men will for ever be indebted for that specific work of their Creator which will most attract their eyes and inspire their songs. On one side they behold mercy, in spotless, unmingled white; and on the other side they behold judgment, darker, indeed, yet equally resplendent. ”

“ Evening and morning you may open the Bible and bend the knee, but the tender plant of righteousness in your heart is not effectually revived by these brief and fitful glances. Before the drooping leaves have had time to feel the genial warmth, another cloud has closed the orifice and left them again in the chill damp shade. Even the Lord’s day, as a gap left open between earth and heaven, is not by any means so wide as it seems ”

“ Suppose a band of living men should rush with all their might against that stone, they would be broken and it would not be moved. If they retire and repeat the onset, the rock lies still in majestic repose, while their feeble limbs are mangled on its sides, and their life-blood sinks into the soil at its base.
The next part of the conception, which the imagination can easily form at will, is precisely the reverse of the first. ”

“ As soon as she had learned that Jesus was at table in Simon the Pharisee’s house, her heart drew her thither to him, that she might offer him the expression of her gratitude and love,—of her adoration and her joy. She took with her a phial of ointment, the costliest that she possessed, found an entrance into the Pharisee’s house, and walked behind backs to the feet of Jesus, as he reclined at table on an elevated cushion. Arrived there, she is incapable of accomplishing her purpose. The thought of the greatness of her sin, and the greatness of the compassion of Jesus, broke her heart. ”