Henry Parry Liddon Quotes

The real difficulty with thousands in the present day is not that Christianity has been found wanting, but that it has never been seriously tried.

If we might reverently imagine ourselves scheming beforehand what kind of book the Book of God ought to be, how different would it be from the actual Bible! There would be as many Bibles as there are souls, and they would differ as widely. But in one thing, amid all their differences, they would probably agree: they would lack the variety, both in form and substance, of the Holy Book which the Church of God places in the hands of her children.

Poverty ... is already half-Christian by its very nature; it has everything to gain by a doctrine which makes so little of the present and the visible, and so much of the future and the unseen.

Let us think today of the prospect of sharing in a sublime and blessed existence such as is portrayed in the text of the Apocalypse before us, and let us ask ourselves whether it should or should not make any difference in our present state of being.

Practically speaking, there are for each one of us two supreme realities
God and the soul. The heavens and the earth will pass away. But the soul will still remain, face to face with God.

What we do on some great occasion will probably depend on what we already are; and what we are will be the result of previous years of self-discipline.

Worship is the common sense of faith in a life to come; and the hours we devote to it will assuredly be among those upon which we shall reflect with most thankful joy when all things here shall have fallen into a very distant background, and when through the Atoning Mercy our true home has been reached at last.

Augustine of Hippo used to say that, but for God's grace, he should have been capable of committing any crime; and it is when we feel this sincerely, that we are most likely to be really improving, and best able to give assistance to others without moral loss to ourselves.

A Christ upon paper, though it were the sacred pages of the Gospel, would have been as powerless to save Christendom as a Christ in fresco; not less feeble than the Countenance which, in the last stages of its decay, may be traced on the wall of the Refectory at Milan. A living Christ is the key to the phenomenon of Christian history.

We cannot think that God frightens us with threatenings which He really does not mean to carry out, without doing Himself obvious dishonour.

The history of the Church of Christ from the days of the Apostles has been a history of spiritual movements.

The Church of the Apostles was a Church of the poor; of silver and gold it had none.

Nothing is really lost by a life of sacrifice; everything is lost by failure to obey God's call.

But wherever we labour, the rule and the profession of the Apostle must be ours; and whatever be our personal mistakes and failures, God grant that our consciences may never accuse us of being ashamed of the Gospel of Christ.

If Christianity has really come from heaven, it must renew the whole life of man; it must govern the life of nations no less than that of individuals; it must control a Christian when acting in his public and political capacity as completely as when he is engaged in the duties which belong to him as a member of a family circle.

It is only Jesus Christ who has thrown light on life and immortality through the gospel; and because He has done so, and has enabled us by His atoning death and intercession to make the most of this discovery, His gospel is, for all who will, a power of God unto salvation.

If a religious principle is worth anything, it applies to a million of human beings as truly as to one; and the difficulty of insisting on its wider application does not furnish any proof that it ought not to be so applied.

Cats are like oysters, in that no one is neutral about them; everyone is, explicitly or implicitly, friendly or hostile to them. And they are like children in their power of discovering, by a rapid and sure instinct, who likes them and who does not. It is difficult to win their affection; and it is easy to forfeit what is hard to win. But when given, their love, although less demonstrative, is more delicate and beautiful than that of a dog.

The great laws of the moral world do not vary, however different, under different dispensations, may be the authoritative enunciation of truth, or the means of propagating and defending it.

Liberalism itself, is, on all matters connected with Church and Education, only a kind of corporate and "respectable" ungodliness.

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

How do I know that there is a God? In the same way that I know, on looking at the sand, when a man or beast has crossed the desert - by His footprints in the world around me.

Patriotism is a virtue, no doubt: and it is a duty to cherish patriotism in ourselves and others. But patriotism means wishing well to our country, and the question is what is this "well". Lord Beaconsfield would say "material prosperity, grandeur, increase of power and territory"; Mr. Gladstone would say "that our country may act virtuously". If patriotism is an extension of the feeling which we have about our relatives, Mr. Gladstone is surely right; we wish our relatives to be good men in the first instance, and then successful men, if success is compatible with goodness. I cannot understand how many excellent people fail to feel thus about their country too; it would seem to me that exactly in the proportion in which we realise the fact that a nation is only a very overgrown family which has kept open house for some centuries will be our anxiety that this country should act as a good man would act; and that patriotism consists in wishing this.

Again and again the Church of Christ has been all but engulfed, as men might have deemed, in the billows; again and again the storm has been calmed by the Master, Who had seemed for awhile to sleep.

Certainly, envy is no monopoly of the poor; it makes itself felt in all sections of society; it haunts the court, the library, the barrack-room, even the sanctuary; it is provoked in some unhappy souls by the near neighbourhood of any superior rank or excellence whatever.

The purely material world seems to have more in common than we with the unchanging and everlasting years of the Great Creator. Yet we know that it is not so. In reality the rocks are less enduring than man. Each man's personal self will still survive for weal or woe, when another catastrophe shall have utterly changed the surface of this planet, and the elements shall have melted with fervent heat, and the earth also and all things that are therein shall have been burnt up.

Look to the end; and resolve to make the service of Christ the first object in what remains of life, without indifference to the opinion of your fellow men, but also without fear of it.