19th-century Theologian Quotes

John Henry Newman

Karl Barth

Brigham Young

William Booth

Edwin Abbott Abbott

Samson Raphael Hirsch

Rudolf Otto

The search for truth is not a trade by which a man can support himself; for a priest it is a supreme peril.

"Look yonder," said my Guide, "in Flatland thou hast lived; of Lineland thou hast received a vision; thou hast soared with me to the heights of Spaceland; now, in order to complete the range of thy experience, I conduct thee downward to the lowest depth of existence, even to the realm of Pointland, the Abyss of No dimensions."

Edwin Abbott Abbott

The life-boat may have a tasteful bend and beautiful decoration, but these are not the qualities for which I prize it; it was my salvation from the howling sea! So the interest which a regenerate soul takes in the Bible, is founded on a personal application to the heart of the saving truth which it contains.

James Waddel Alexander

The Holy Spirit of God dwelling in us, knowing our wants better than we, Himself pleads in our prayers, raising us to higher and holier desires than we can express in words, which can only find utterance in sighings and aspirations.

Our earthly possessions will indeed perish in the final wreck of all things; but let the ship perish, let all we have sink in the deep, if we may come "safe to land." From these storms and billows — these dangerous seas — these tempestuous voyages — may we all be brought at last, safe to heaven.

A being is free only when it can determine and limit its activity.

The law of the harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.

George Boardman the Younger

Good cookery is not an extravagance but an economy, and many a tasty dish is made by our Continental friends out of materials which would be discarded indignantly by the poorest tramp in Whitechapel.

Myth does not want to be interpreted in cosmological terms but in anthropological terms or, better, in existentialist terms.

Rudolf Bultmann

There never has been a great and beautiful character, which has not become so by filling well the ordinary and smaller offices appointed of God.

Horace Bushnell

The art of life consists in taking each event which befalls us with a contented mind, confident of good.... With this method... rejoice always, though in the midst of sorrows, and possess all things, though destitute of everything.

James Freeman Clarke

All things are ordered by God, but His providence takes in our free agency, as well as His own sovereignty.

Good is that darkening of our lives,
Which only God can brighten;
But better still that hopeless load,
Which none but God can lighten.

Frederick William Faber

For ages the world has been waiting and watching; millions, with broken hearts, have hovered around the yawning abyss; but no echo has come back from the engulfing gloom —silence, oblivion, covers all. If indeed they survive; if they went away whole and victorious, they give us no signals. We wait for years, but no messages come from the far-away shore to which they have gone.

Randolph Sinks Foster

However important it is that love shall precede marriage, it is far more important that it shall continue after marriage.

Samson Raphael Hirsch

I am as sure as I am of the fact of Christ's reign, that a comprehensive and centralised system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief and of anti-social nihilistic ethics, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.

Archibald Alexander Hodge

All Church power is, therefore, properly ministerial and administrative. Everything is to be done in the name of Christ, and in accordance with his directions.

We are to regard the mind, not as a piece of iron to be laid upon the anvil and hammered into any shape, nor as a block of marble in which we are to find the statue by removing the rubbish, nor as a receptacle into which knowledge may be poured; but as a flame that is to be fed, as an active being that must be strengthened to think and to feel -- and to dare, to do, and to suffer.

Long before I had ever seen a ritualistic service I became a Ritualist.

Truth has her sterner responsibilities sooner or later in store for those who have known anything about her.

Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle.

Pouter, tumbler and fantail are from the same source;
The racer and hack may be traced to one horse;
So men were developed from monkeys of course,
Which nobody can deny.

True religion is slow in growth, and, when once planted, is difficult of dislodgement; but its intellectual counterfeit has no root in itself: it springs up suddenly, it suddenly withers.

John Henry Newman

Theologians have felt no hesitation in founding a system of speculative thought on the teachings of Jesus; and yet Jesus was never an inhabitant of the realm of speculative thought.

Walter Rauschenbusch

For when man comes to front the everlasting God, and look the splendor of His judgments in the face, personal integrity, the dream of spotlessness and innocence, vanishes into thin air: your decencies and your church-goings and your regularities and your attachment to a correct school and party, your gospel formulas of sound doctrine--what is all that, in front of the blaze of the wrath to come?

Frederick William Robertson