Born again

“ I believe Jesus of Nazareth, sooner than those infidels who say you do not need to be born again. Parents, if you hope to see your children who have gone before, you must be born of the Spirit. Possibly you are a father or a mother who has recently borne a loved one to the grave; and how dark your home seems! Never more will you see your child, unless you are born again. If you wish to be re-united to your loved one, you must be born again. ”

“ Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. ”

“ This is what is meant by being born again, the incarnation of the Spirit in the conscious, or human. The two selves are no longer divided, and the higher self assumes control,—takes the reins, so to speak. ”

“ O Nature, say where, thou gray mother of earth, Is the strength of thy youth? that thy womb brings to birth Only old men to-day! On the winds, as of old, Thy voice in its accent is joyous and bold; Thy forests are green as of yore; and thine oceans Yet move in the might of their ancient emotions: But man—thy last birth and thy best—is no more Life's free lord, that look'd up to the starlight of yore, With the faith on the brow, and the fire in the eyes, The firm foot on the earth, the high heart in the skies; But a gray-headed infant, defrauded of youth, Born too late or too early. ”

“ What a dream must this life soon become to us if we are born, through death, into another one widely different from it! and seeing what death does to this body of ours, how can it be other than widely different? ”

“ The world was blotted out—sun and bay and wheeling sky. A new world was born—of two souls and swift desire. The heart of the universe opened to them. When they drew apart, her eyes were lighted with tears. ”

“ Up to the rising stars I looked and cried,
‘There is no death! for year on year, re-born
I wake to larger life: to joy more great,
So many times have I been crucified,
So often seen the resurrection morn,
I go triumphant, though new Calvaries wait. ”

“ She nodded and smiled:
“The youngest born is the most tenderly cherished—until a new one comes. It is that way with me; I am all love and devotion and tenderness and self-sacrifice while fussing over my youngest. Then a still younger comes, and I become like a heartless cat and drive away all progeny except the newly born.” ”

“ He beheld suddenly with the vision of some one new-born, and through his brain and body into the locked recesses of his soul there passed the elemental passions and movements of the world that had swayed creation from the beginning. ”

“ Think of the great waves of human hopes and disappointments and joys that have rolled to and fro across this miserable patch of earth! Think of the brave hearts that came hot with the excitement of the quest, and departed broken with the emptiness of it. Also, of those others, who never departed, but lie at rest beneath that yellow clay. Just a little while, in the new-born one, is centred alike the glow of success and the cold chill of failure; all the might of swift fierce endeavour, every passion, good and bad, that convulses our wretched souls. ”

“ The joy-bell of birth is a note of warning to the knell for the dead; it wakes the worms beneath the mould: the new-born, every year that it grows and flourishes, speeds the parent to their feast. Yet who can predict that the infant shall become the heir? Who can tell that Death sits not side by side with the nurse at the cradle? ”

“ But so it is; generations and generations are born, live, and die, and the old bells, a-takin' life easy, jest swing on, and ring out jest as sweet and calm and kinder careless at our death as at our birth. ”

“ Does someone say, concerning a little child, "But we thought he had the grace of God in his heart, that he had been born again and would no more do wrong"? True, he may be born again, but there is a world of difference between being born and being grown up. ”

“ As for the doctrine of regeneration, I think that by being born again the dear Lord meant that we cannot apprehend spiritual truths unless our minds are earnestly set upon understanding them. To any one who has led a simple, material life, without aspiration or moral reflection, the change by which his attention becomes fastened upon the nobler aspect of character and of life is really like a new birth. ”

“ The soul of a child who dies at that age has to begin life over again, disengaging itself from the little corpse, it incarnates itself in another newly-born body, and after this fresh incarnation, it begins a second life. ”

“ I feel as if I were in heaven to-day—all because the day is splendid and I have been driving about all the morning in a small sleigh in the fresh air and sunshine, until I found that I had in spite of myself, for the time being, stopped asking the usual inward question of why I was born. ”

“ As an infant child not yet fully awake hears the holy warblings of his mother's hymn, and smiles half conscious, so the heaven-born became aware of sweet voices and loving faces around him ere yet he fully woke to the new immortal Life. ”

“ Being born is being shown to the world and seeing the world for the first time. At the end of nine months after God and Daddy and Mummy started to make you, you were ready to open your eyes and breathe and cry, and be a real live baby, and that day they showed you to somebody and you saw the world. ”

“ And there will be only heroes left, and each fresh child born into the world will receive as his birthgift the whole earth, the unbounded expanse of heaven, and the paternal sun, the source of immortal life. ”

“ They must not only be born again but they must be born again each one of them of a new father and of a new mother and of a different line of ancestry for many generations before their minds could become supple enough to learn anew. ”

“ Theologically the thing is best expressed by saying, "You must be born again." Secularly it is best expressed by saying, "You must keep your birthday." Even if you will not be born again, at least remind yourself occasionally that you were born once. ”

“ The unborn know nothing of the life on earth; yet the born of earth know somewhat of them, and make ready for their coming. Who knows but men born to heaven are waiting for your birth to come—have gone to prepare a place for us? All that is fancy, and not fact; it is not philosophy, but poetry ”

“ But being there one feels a citizen; Escape seems hopeless to the heart forlorn: Can Death-in-Life be brought to life again? 10 And yet release does come; there comes a morn When he awakes from slumbering so sweetly That all the world is changed for him completely, And he is verily as if new-born. ”

“ What man in all the world, what event, could console me for all the good I had lost?" And the future seemed frightful and hopeless to me. The undefined image of the infant to be born grew, enlarged, like horrible and formless things one sees sometimes in a nightmare, and ended by enveloping everything. ”

“ And more deeply sad still is it, when the aged learn through the young to feel that the freshness of existence has gone by with them. Gone by? when they are waiting to be born into a new and vast existence that shall roll on in increasing majesty, and never reach an end! ”

“ It would be fine to keep being born over again and keep beginning everything over again from the start, traversing again the magic realm of surprises that dazzles us with the first colored glass, with the first Christmas-tree candle, somewhat later with the first kiss, and always as an undreamed-of virgin country.... ”

“ Nay, we are all waiting to be born, our whole nature looking to another world, and dimly presaging what that world shall be. Death, however we misname him, seasonable or out of time, is the birth-angel, that alone. ”

“ It is from such soil that the new life should spring. It is the inherent right of the new life to have its inception in such physical ground, in such spiritual atmosphere. The child thus born is indeed a flower of love and tremendous joy. ”

“ When we undergo this great change, we may, with much propriety, be said to be born again, because there is so near a resemblance between the circumstances of the natural and of the spiritual birth; so that to consider the circumstances of the natural birth, is the most easy way to understand the spiritual. ”

“ It seems to bring back feelings you had when you were a baby. It carries you back into the dark, before you were born; you can't see things, but they come to you, somehow, and you know them and aren't afraid of them. ”

“ Eternities before the first-born day,
Or ere the first sun fledged his wings of flame,
Calm Night, the everlasting and the same,
A brooding mother over chaos lay. ”

“ Sometimes this effect is produced by a few simple terms reiterated into lingering music. "We are born, and our birth is unremembered, and our infancy remembered but in fragments; we live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life." ”

“ If we are tips of the twigs of a vast buried tree, these twigs may become themselves roots of a yet greater one and even a true superman may yet be born in the line of any of us. Thus, perhaps all the other immortalities have their dynamogeny in the instincts of parenthood. ”

“ But there is something in the place where we were born that holds us always by the heartstrings. ”

“ and to begin to be something different from what it was before, is called being born; ”

“ We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful. ”

“ We, helpless infants in arms or creeping quadruped-like on the floor, dreamed our dreams of air flight. Yes; and we endured the torment and torture of nightmare fears of dim and monstrous things. We newborn infants, without experience, were born with fear, with memory of fear; and memory is experience. ”

“ Our first birth, however, is only a sleep and a forgetting, [194] and real Youth comes only after the second-birth. The once-born are creatures of pure circumstance, owing their youth to the accident of time alone; but the twice-born are self-creations defying time; they never grow old, though they are always growing up. ”

“ You have no reason to wonder at any thing you see or hear, of the partiality, selfishness, envy, and enmity, that so soon breaks out between brothers and sisters of the same blood.――For if blood-relations, considered as such, could have any true goodness, or unselfish regard to one another, we should not be under the necessity of being born again. ”

“ What life inherit?"
Then the wind blew sweet and was gone,
And a voice said, "So is one
Born of the Spirit."
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago. ”

“ We have our dream. The idea of immortality, that like a sea has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, beating with its countless waves against the sands and rocks of time and fate, was not born of any book or of any creed. ”

“ It is as natural to die, as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful, as the other. ”

“ I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums. ”

“ The little child who was to have done so much was born before the turf was planted on its father’s grave. It was a boy; and I, my husband, and my guardian gave him his father’s name.
The help that my dear counted on did come to her, though it came, in the eternal wisdom, for another purpose. Though to bless and restore his mother, not his father, was the errand of this baby, its power was mighty to do it. When I saw the strength of the weak little hand and how its touch could heal my darling’s heart and raised hope within her, I felt a new sense of the goodness and the tenderness of God. ”

“ “I wish I had never been born—there or anywhere else!” ”

“ —The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. ”

“ It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. ”