British Theologian Quotes

Thomas Cranmer
John Wesley
William Booth
Edwin Abbott Abbott
William Paley
Richard Hooker
Frederick William Faber

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.

A belief is made religious, not so much by its content, as rather by the way it is held.

The account of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as the manuscripts are inaccurately designated, and of the half a century of intense research that followed, is in itself a fascinating as well as an exasperating story.

If you see things as in eternity, you are less a prey to the pain of their passing, and so you can learn the more easily not to clutch at them as they pass... you learn to be reverent and not proudly possessive.

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

Ian Maclaren
Ian Maclaren
If you are under the dominion of sin, you are yet an utter stranger to the salvation of God.

If within us we find nothing over us we succumb to what is around us.

God hath put no such difference between the Male and Female as man would make.

Margaret Fell
Margaret Fell
The mark of a saint is not perfection, but consecration. A saint is not a person without faults, but a man who has given himself without reserve to God.

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.

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
Frederick William Faber
What is the pattern of worship that best conveys the richness of divine grace, faithfully interprets the gospel in our modern world and helpfully consolidates the body of Christ?

God gave you not a spirit of faithlessness, not a spirit of despair.

Joseph Lightfoot
Joseph Lightfoot
Human life is created in God's image, and that makes it sacred.

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

From all those created in the image of God there is something to be received, and to them something to be given.

I observe there is in Mr. Hooker no affected language; but a grave, comprehensive, clear manifestation of reason, and that backed with the authority of the Scriptures, the fathers and schoolmen, and with all law both sacred and civil.

Richard Hooker
Richard Hooker
His imperial fancy has laid all Nature under tribute, and has collected riches from every scene of the creation and every walk of art.

Why God should want and need us is a mystery. But it is true: otherwise he would not have created us and life would ultimately have no meaning for us. It is good to remember that in God the is a constancy, a consistency of attitude which never changes, irrespective of what we are or how we act: he never changes in is wanting us or needing us.

Basil Hume
Basil Hume
Art reminds us that in fact the world always exceeds our grasp and perception.

Light from a concave luminous body is received most powerfully at the centre. The reason for this is that, for every point of a concave body, perpendicular rays, which are stronger than others, converge in the centre. Therefore the virtues of celestial bodies are incident most powerfully in and near the centre of the world.

Jesus' disclosure shows that in his very nature God is self-effacing, whereas Christian orthodoxy has thought of him as the opposite; majestic, glorious and triumphal.

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)
John Caird (theologian)
The absorption of the individual in the universal is only another term for its destruction.