Maltbie Davenport Babcock Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

This is my Father's world: O let me ne'er forget That though the wrong Seems oft so strong, God is the Ruler yet.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
The world is God's workshop; the raw materials are His; the ideals and patterns are His; our hands are "the members of Christ," our reward His recognition. Blacksmith or banker, draughtsman or doctor, painter or preacher, servant or statesman, must work as unto the Lord, not merely making a living, but devoting a life. This makes life sacramental, turning its water into wine. This is twice blessed, blessing both the worker and the work.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
If you can help anybody even a little, be glad; up the steps of usefulness and kindness, God will lead you on to happiness and friendship.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
We should care, not so much about being recognized, as about being worth recognition.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Although there is nothing so bad for conscience as trifling, there is nothing so good for conscience as trifles. Its certain discipline and development are related to the smallest things. Conscience, like gravitation, takes hold of atoms. Nothing is morally indifferent. Conscience must reign in manners as well as morals, in amusements as well as work. He only who is "faithful in that which is least" is dependable in all the world.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Salvation is not putting a man into heaven but putting heaven into a man.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Unless we realize our sins enough to call them by name, it is hardly worth while to say anything about them at all. When we pray for forgiveness, let us say, "my temper," or "untruthfulness," or "pride," "my selfishness, my cowardice, indolence, jealousy, revenge, impurity." To recognize our sins, we must look them in the face and call them by their right names, however hard. Honesty in confession calls for definiteness in confession.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
The root of honesty is an honest intention, the distinct and deliberate purpose to be true, to handle facts as they are, and not as we wish them to be. Facts lend themselves to manipulation. Many a butcher's hand is worth more than its weight in gold. What we want things to be, we come to see them to be; and the tailor pulls the coat and the truth into a perfect fit from his point of view.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
May death be no more than the bell that sounds when school is over, and going home, may I find that I had laid up my treasure in the right place.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
The Christian life that is joyless is a discredit to God and a disgrace to itself.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
What is our hope but the indwelling Spirit of Christ, to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, to inspire every word and deed by His love? Then will "broken lights" blend in steady shining, the fractional be summed up in the integral, and life, unified and beautified by the central Christ, radiate God's glory, and shine with divine effulgence.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Worship demands the far distances of God; it protests against the little, the near, the material. It must love but it must look up. It cannot live without the note of spirituality and universality, if not mystery. The ascension, the passing of Christ within the veil, answers this need. So does a full-robed Christianity add to definiteness of knowledge the outreach of imagination and home.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
One of the commonest mistakes and one of the costliest is thinking that success is due to some genius, some magic – something or other which we do not possess. Success is generally due to holding on, and failure to letting go.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
The kindness of Christmas is the kindness of Christ. To know that God so loved us as to give us His Son for our dearest Brother, has brought human affection to its highest tide on the day of that Brother's birth. If God so loved us, how can we help loving one another?

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
I agree with you that the communion with the invisible saints must be more of a dream than a reality. But we have a right to dream dreams, if they are not contradicted by the evident laws of God's word, or God's world.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
The deeper men go into life, the deeper is their conviction that this life is not all. It is an "unfinished symphony." A day may round out an insect's life, and a bird or a beast needs no to-morrow. Not so with him who knows that he is related to God and has felt "the power of an endless life."

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Temperament is wax before the human will and God. Natural traits are powerless before moral decisions.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Loyalty to God is alone fundamental. Feelings, words, deeds, must be beads strung on the string of duty.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
The tests of life are to make, not break us. Trouble may demolish a man's business but build up his character. The blow at the outward man may be the greatest blessing to the inner man. If God, then, puts or permits anything hard in our lives, be sure that the real peril, the real trouble, is that we shall lose if we flinch or rebel.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Present suffering is not enjoyable, but life would be worth little without it. The difference between iron and steel is fire, but steel is worth all it costs.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Is not this steadfastness to mark, to make, the character of your lives? Is it not God's will that we should press steadily on to our goal in obedience to Him, in channels of His choosing, whether in sunshine or shadow, in the cheer of spring or in the chill of winter, neither detained by pleasure nor deterred by pain?

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
A day dawns, quite like other days; in it, a single hour comes, quite like other hours; but in that day and in that hour the chance of a lifetime faces us.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Life is what we are alive to. It is not length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, history, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, it is to be all but dead.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
God be thanked for that good and perfect gift, the gift unspeakable: His life, His love, His very self in Jesus Christ.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
If we show the Lord's death at Communion, we must show the Lord's life in the world. If it is a Eucharist on Sunday, it must prove on Monday that it was also a Sacrament.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Business is religion, and religion is business. The man who does not make a business of his religion has a religious life of no force, and the man who does not make a religion of his business has a business life of no character.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Christlike is a word often on our lips. Do not speak it too lightly. It is the heart of God's predestination. It is our high calling.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Good habits are not made on birthdays, nor Christian character at the new year. The workshop of character is everyday life. The uneventful and commonplace hour is where the battle is lost or won.

Maltbie Davenport Babcock