19th-century Theologian Quotes

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

Prayers born out of murmuring are always dangerous. When, therefore, we are in a discontented mood, let'us take care what we cry for, lest God give it to us, and thereby punish us.

William Mackergo Taylor

The grave is a very small hillock, but we can see farther from it, when standing on it, than from the highest mountain in all the world.

Friedrich Tholuck

In the highest class of God's school of suffering we learn not resignation nor patience, but rejoicing in tribulation.

John Heyl Vincent

Duty does not consist in suffering everything, but in suffering everything for duty. Sometimes, indeed, it is our duty not to suffer.

Alexandre Vinet

There is one only and true God, but in the unity of the Godhead there are three coeternal and coequal Persons, the same in substance but distinct in subsistence.

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield

The death of Jesus was the opening and the emptying of the full heart of God; it was the outgushing of that ocean of infinite mercy that heaved and panted and longed for an outlet; it was God showing how he could love a poor, guilty sinner.

Octavius Winslow

When the Lord fights the battles of the saints, he does it so effectually that nobody gets nervous but the enemy

Not to return to the old … can be the task of our time, but to clothe the spirit of Christianity, its religious-ethical principle, which lay as a compelling force at the basis of all preceding developments, in the fitting and intelligible form for our age.

Otto Pfleiderer

They are separated from the mass, set apart that they may be a peculiar people to the Lord.

Hermann Friedrich Kohlbrugge

The world is anxiously waiting to see what Jesus Christ can do in, by, for, and through one man wholly given to him - God-led. You can be that man.

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

Henry Scott Holland

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel.

John Mason Neale

What a pity it is that there are so many words! Whenever one wants to say anything, three or four ways of saying it run into one's head together; and one can't tell which to choose. It is as troublesome and puzzling as choosing a ribbon... or a husband.

Logic is like sitting on the bank of a river and deducing its contents from a fish caught in its waters.

Edgar Young Mullins

The policy is obliteration, openly acknowledged. This is not a justifiable act of war.

Of the saturation bombing of Berlin

George Bell (bishop)

Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime,—
A rose-red city—half as old as Time!

Sight is not faith, and hearing is not faith, neither is feeling faith; but believing when we neither see, hear, nor feel is faith; and everywhere the Bible tells us our salvation is to be by faith. Therefore we must believe before we feel, and often against our feelings, if we would honor faith.

Hannah Whitall Smith

Yet, when all is said and done, birthdays are mere records of time, not registers of distance. They are chronometers, not speedometers. They tell us how long we have been upon the road, not how far we have travelled.

Frank W. Boreham

It's said that the shuffling of the cards is the earth, and the pattering of the cards is the rain, and the beating of the cards is the wind, and the pointing of the cards is the fire. That's of the four suits. But the Greater Trumps, it's said, are the meaning of all process and the measure of the everlasting dance.

Charles Williams (British writer)

It is in vain for us to devise schemes by which competition can be put out of civilized life. Competition is the condition of life.

As I pass it, I feel as if I saw a dear old mother, sweet in her weakness, trembling at the approach of her dissolution, but not appealing to me against the inevitable, rather endeavouring to reassure me by her patience, and pointing to a hopeful future.

Thomas Edward Brown

People complain that our generation has no philosophers. They are wrong. They now sit in another faculty. Their names are Max Planck and Albert Einstein.

Adolf von Harnack

God does not love that which is already in itself worthy of love, but on the contrary, that which in itself has no worth acquires worth just by becoming the object of God's love. Agape has nothing to do with the kind of love that depends on the recognition of a valuable quality in its object. Agape does not recognize value, but creates it. Agape loves, and imparts value by loving. The man who is loved by God has no value in himself; what gives him value is precisely the fact that God loves him. Agape is a value-creating principle.

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