19th-century Theologian Quotes

The New Testament preaches a Christ who was dead and is alive, not a Christ who was alive and is dead.

To mention Science and Religion in the same sentence is... to affirm an antithesis and suggest a conflict.

Charles E. Raven

The method of idealistic epistemology is like that of the quack physician; it first administers a drug which makes the patient's ailment chronic, thus making its own further services seem permanently indispensable.

Douglas Clyde Macintosh

God calls us to duty, and the only right answer is obedience...whether we ourselves get enjoyment and blessing from the task or not, the call must be obeyed...It is better to obey blunderingly than not to obey at all.

George Hodges (theologian)

The absorption of the individual in the universal is only another term for its destruction.

What men deny is not God, but some preposterous idol of the imagination.

A round square or a wooden iron is an absurdity and consequently an impossibility.

The Gospel does not require anything good that man must furnish: not a good heart, not a good disposition, no improvement of his condition, no godliness, no love either of God or men…….. It plants love into his heart and makes him capable of all good works. It demands nothing, but it gives all. Should not this fact make us leap for JOY?

C. F. W. Walther

We are the archenemy of our own salvation, and the Shepherd must fight first of all with us - for us.

Romano Guardini

Religion needs science, to protect it from religion's greatest danger, superstition.

Edgar J. Goodspeed

Botany differs from century to century as men learn more; but the plants and trees remain the same.

Henry Sloane Coffin

It is a theory of nature, that system of things which allows a plant to grow, an animal to graze, and a man to think, fully as much as it allows the sun to be eclipsed or bodies to be in motion or at rest.

Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge

To tell a man who has no realization that he is lost, that he may be saved by faith in Christ, means nothing to him, however true and blessed the fact is in itself.

Harry A. Ironside

The truth cannot be deceptive, and one who sees it cannot be deceived.

There is a saying in China that the nature of man is found there, in the center, where emotions are not yet manifest. In this center is the potentiality of everything to come.

Richard Wilhelm (sinologist)

There is provided an escape from the narrowness and poverty of the individual life, and the possibility of a life which is other and larger than our own, yet which is most truly our own. For, to be ourselves, we must be more than ourselves. What we call love is, in truth... the losing of our individual selves to gain a larger self.

John Caird (theologian)

We do not cease to be children because we are disobedient children.

Frederick Denison Maurice

Death is nothing at all; it does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room.

Henry Scott Holland

The concupiscence of the eyes touches the soul at a higher level than that of the flesh, and is consequently even more subtle and dangerous. Everyone can distinguish sins of the flesh, and most people endeavor to keep themselves from any serious entanglement with them, but it is quite possible to become considerably involved in the concupiscence of the eyes without being in the least aware of the fact.

Frederic Harton

I predict that the time will come in this once free America when the battle for religious liberty will have to be fought over again, and will probably be lost, because the people are already ignorant of its true basis and conditions.

Robert Lewis Dabney

More and more, science has become not only increasingly necessary as a foundation for professional skill, but has come to be regarded as the most valuable instrument of culture.

Henry Preserved Smith

Prayer is not the cunning art of using God, subjecting Him to one's selfish ends in an effort to get out of Him what you want.

Friedrich von Hügel

Without earnestness no man is ever great, or does really great things. He may be the cleverest of men; he may be brilliant, entertaining, popular; but he will want weight. No soul-moving picture was ever painted that had not in it depth of shadow.

Say what men may, it is doctrine that moves the world. He who takes no position will not sway the human intellect.

William Greenough Thayer Shedd

The majority of mankind think that they think; they acquiesce, and suppose that they argue; they flatter themselves that they are holding their own, when they have actually grown up to manhood, with scarcely a conviction that they can call their own. So it was, and so it ever shall be.

E. W. Bullinger