Sacred object

“ The sacred hallows in turn its reverer, who by his worship becomes himself a saint, as likewise what he does is saintly, a saintly walk, saintly thoughts and actions, imaginations and aspirations, etc. ”

“ This common way a man can take in his dressing-gown. But spiritual elation in the eternal, the sacred, the infinite, moves along the highway of truth in the robes of the high priests—a road that, from the first, is itself immediate being in its innermost, the inspiration of profound and original ideas and flashes of elevated thought. ”

“ The example of the saint shows that the most essential preparation for the study of the holy scriptures consists in simplicity and purity of heart, an eminent spirit of prayer, and habitual profound meditation on the sacred oracles. Thus qualified, he, with admirable sagacity and piety, penetrates and unfolds the unbounded spiritual riches of the least tittle in the divine word; and explains its sacred truths with incomparable ease, perspicuity, elegance, and energy of style. The moral instructions are enforced by all the strength and ornaments of the most sweet and persuasive eloquence. ”

“ HOLY, sacred, devoted or set apart for religious worship or observance; a term characteristic of the attributes of perfection and sinlessness of the Persons of the Trinity, as the objects of human worship and reverence, and hence transferred to those human persons who, either by their devotion to a spiritual ascetic life or by their approximation to moral perfection, are considered worthy of reverence. ”

“ The majesty of God and the sanctity of religion require the first, in order to excite in the minds of men proper sentiments of reverence and devotion; and experience itself shows how much the sacred ceremonies of religion conduce to this end. ”

“ That the essence of religion consisted in the feelings of divine love; and that it was a matter of indifference what opinions Christians entertained concerning points of faith, provided their hearts burned with the sacred flame of piety and love. (2.) That the union of the soul with Christ transforms it into the essence of the Deity. ”

“ Only among the votaries of the sacred art is that profound conception of God—a God whose very name, written within the symbol of the Trinity, can move mountains, transmute metals, change and overthrow the four elements. ”

“ While theologians are unanimous in accepting the doctrine of the personal indwelling of the Holy Ghost in the just as clearly contained in Sacred Scripture and Tradition, they differ in explaining the manner in which He dwells in the soul. ”

“ Those who are God-conscious without symbolism must not deny the grace-ministry of the symbol to those who find it difficult to worship Deity and to revere truth, beauty, and goodness without form and ritual. In prayerful worship, most mortals envision some symbol of the object-goal of their devotions.
6. THE PROVINCE OF PRAYER Prayer, unless in liaison with the will and actions of the personal spiritual forces and material supervisors of a realm, can have no direct effect upon one's physical environment. ”

“ Let us not handle them with superstitious reverence as relics, but make use of them to raise our minds from the absorbing cares and pleasures of the present, to holy musings on the past. May the Spirit of Wisdom and Truth assist us in our meditations, and increase our deep reverence for those sacred Scriptures in which these objects of interest are preserved. ”

“ Now holiness is ascribed, not only to sacred persons, namely, those who are consecrated to the divine worship, but also to sacred places and to certain other sacred things. And the holiness of a place is directed to the holiness of man, who worships God in a holy place. ”

“ In this process no religious act is essential, but in practice it is introduced by prayers and sacrifices, and a sacred formula appealing to the great gods who know the walk of men, so that it is considered to be by their divine aid that the accused rises or falls at once in material fact and moral metaphor. ”

“ May you each and all share in the Divine Bounties of the Kingdom of Heaven. May the world be for you no obstacle hiding the truth from your sight, as the human body of Christ hid His Divinity from the people of His day. May you receive the clear vision of the Holy Spirit, so that your hearts may be illumined and able to recognize the Sun of Truth shining through all material clouds, His splendour flooding the universe. ”

“ These moral perfections constitute God a proper object of religious adoration, and without which no worship would be due or could be rendered to him. The Divine Nature is the foundation of that worship which we, as rational beings, are under obligations to perform; and the revelation of the will of God, with which he has graciously favored us in the Scripture, is the constant rule of his worship. ”

“ Oh that the sinfulness of our nature, and all that is of self, may be so discovered to us, that it may be no longer possible to live in it! May the Light that reveals this, reveal too, how Thy Holiness is our only hope, our sure refuge, our complete deliverance. O Lord! speak into our souls the word, ‘The Holy One, your Redeemer,’ ‘Your Holy One,’ with such power by Thy Spirit, that our faith may grow into the assured confidence that we can be holy as Thou art holy. ”

“ How much more reasonable is it to conceive the Divine Essence to subsist in a plurality of persons, and thus to conceive, consistently, of the eternal, immense, and immutable activity and happiness of the Divine Being? ”

“ Whose doctrine pierced, Whose life preached, Whose miracles astonished, Whose blood atoned, and Whose death, resurrection and ascension, confirmed that blessed manifestation to be no less than the Word God manifested in the flesh for the salvation of the world, and if we now receive Him into our hearts, as the true Light, that leads in the way of life eternal. ”

“ Such I believe to have been the central idea of the beautiful creed which, for 1,500 years, tuned the heart and formed the mind of the noblest of mankind. From this centre it radiated out and spread, as time went on, into the full circle of human activity, flinging its own philosophy and its own peculiar grace over the common details of the common life of all of us. Like the seven lamps before the Throne of God, the seven mighty angels, and the seven stars, the seven sacraments shed over mankind a never-ceasing stream of blessed influences. ”

“ In which man, considering the titles of God which have reference to the state and condition of grace, offers and dedicates himself entirely to him as far as regards his spiritual state of life through grace.
O most high, powerful, and merciful God, adorable and incomprehensible Trinity! I offer, dedicate, and consecrate to thee my soul, with all its powers and faculties, all the capacity of my will to love thee, and of my intellect to know thee, to my own abasement and thy greater glory. ”

“ I follow no ritual, and trust no creed, except so far as it is conformable to the instinct of faith—the inward revelation of Himself which he has implanted in my soul—and to that outward revelation, the nearest and clearest that He has ever given of Himself to men, the Divine revelation of love which I find here, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, my Lord. ”

“ Article I—Of Faith in the Holy Trinity
There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body or parts, of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the maker and preserver of all things, both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there are three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. ”

“ God in Christ, operating in the person of the Holy Ghost, must be the principle of inward inspiration moment by moment, the crucifier of every wrong desire and purpose, the Author of every right and holy purpose, the Light and Life of the soul."—Upham. ”

“ In the Body, as well as in each single member of it, and the more because the Body is an incomparably grander creation, it is the sanctified intellect which must receive, harmonise, and develope the truth. If the sevenfold fountain of the Spirit's gifts is one in the individual, much more is it one in that Body out of whose plenitude the individual receives. Thus wherever the Apostles preached the word, if faith made it fruitful, they bestowed the sacraments. ”

“ Come and veil the face: withdraw eye and mind from gazing on what passes knowledge, and let the soul be gathered into that inner stillness, in which the worship of the heavenly Sanctuary alone can be heard. Come and cover the feet: withdraw from the rush of work and haste, be it worldly or religious, and learn to worship. Come, and as you fall down in self-abasement, the glory of the Holy One will shine upon you. ”

“ But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects, religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power. God's attributes as such, his holiness, his justice, his mercy, his absoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri-unity, the various mysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments, etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Christian believers. ”

“ O Holy God! give Thou Thyself the answer to Thy question, and teach us and the world what manner of persons Thy people can be, in the day of Thy power, in the beauty of holiness. We bow our knee to Thee, O Father, that Thou wouldst grant us, according to the riches of Thy glory, to be mightily strengthened in the inner man by the Spirit of Holiness. ”

“ And, necessarily, considering what is the object in religion, when we undertake to examine any particular form of it which has obtained among any people or at any period of time, we must ask, How far did its priests and sages teach exalted ideas of Deity, of the soul, and of immortality? ”

“ A message from the Word of life, from the eternal Word, we should gladly receive: and the present one is this (relating to the nature of God whom we are to serve, and with whom we should covet all indulged communion) — That God is light, and in him is no darkness at all, v. 5. This report asserts the excellency of the divine nature. He is all that beauty and perfection that can be represented to us by light. He is a self-active uncompounded spirituality, purity, wisdom, holiness, and glory. And then the absoluteness and fulness of that excellency and perfection. ”

“ Holiness appears to express what is the very essence or perfection of the Divine Being Himself. None of the attributes can be predicated of all that belongs to God; but Scripture speaks of His Holy Name, His Holy Day, His Holy Habitation, His Holy Word. In the word Holy we have the nearest possible approach to a summary of all the Divine perfections, the description of what Divinity is. We speak of the other attributes as Divine perfections, but in this we have the only human expression for the Divine Perfection itself. ”

“ The written word of God is the garment of the Divine Thought which is the real Word of God. It takes more than eyes of flesh to see through the temporal garment to the inner Life and Spirit beneath. Only the person who has in himself the illumination of the same Spirit that gave the original revelation can see through the garment of the letter to the eternal message, the ever-living Word hidden within. [12] In the Christianity of the full-grown spiritual man, sacraments and everything external must be used only as pictorial helps and symbolic suggestions for the furtherance of spiritual life. ”

“ The objective Divine gift, bestowed once for all and completely, must be appropriated as a subjective personal possession; we must cleanse ourselves, perfecting holiness. Redeemed unto holiness: as the two thoughts are linked in the mind and work of God, they must be linked in our heart and life. ”

“ Wherefore, both in Holy Scripture and in the writings of the fathers, men are styled regenerated, new creatures, partakers of the divine nature, children of God, god-like, and similar epithets. Now these great blessings are justly attributed as especially belonging to the Holy Ghost. ”

“ The hidden man of the heart; that is, the soul; the hidden, the inner man. Take care to adorn and beautify your souls rather than your bodies. Secondly, The ornament prescribed. It must, in general, be something not corruptible, that beautifies the soul, that is, the graces and virtues of God's Holy Spirit. The ornaments of the body are destroyed by the moth, and perish in the using; but the grace of God, the longer we wear it, the brighter and better it is. ”

“ In the Divine holiness we have the highest and inconceivably glorious revelation of the very essence of the Divine Being; in the holiness of the saints the deepest revelation of the change by which their inmost nature is renewed into the likeness of God. ”

“ God the Holy Ghost represents Spiritual religion: the Father represents God in Nature, the Son represents God in History, and "the Holy Ghost represents to us God in our own hearts and spirits and consciences." ”

“ This sacrament is the gift of gifts and the grace of graces. When the almighty and eternal God comes to us, with all the perfections of His thrice-holy humanity and His divinity, He surely does not come empty-handed. ”

“ The candidate was taught that the multitudinous deities of the popular theology were but hidden symbols of the various attributes of the supreme god,--a spirit invisible and indivisible,--and that the soul, as an emanation from his essence, could "never see corruption," but must, after the death of the body, be raised to an eternal life. ”

“ One more hymn to show how the belief in and the worship of these physical gods, the actors behind the phenomena of nature, could grow naturally into a belief in and a worship of moral powers, endowed with all the qualities essential to divine beings. ”

“ That Divine Wisdom, that contrived and beautified this glorious structure, can best explain her own art, and carry up the soul back again in these reflected beams to Him who is the Fountain of them.... Good men may easily find every creature pointing out to that Being whose image and superscription it bears, and climb up from those darker resemblances of the Divine wisdom and goodness, shining out in different degrees upon several creatures, till they sweetly repose themselves in the bosom of the Divinity ”