God will not force any door to enter in. He may send a tempest about the house; yea, shake the house to its foundations. The door must be opened by the willing hand, ere the foot of Love will cross the threshold
The sole ambition that is of God is the ambition to rise above oneself; all other is of the devil. Yet it is nursed and cherished in many a soul that thinks itself devout, filling it with petty cares and disappointments that swarm like bats and shut out the glory of God.
With every trouble, great or small, go to God, and appeal to him, the God of your life. If your trouble is such that you cannot appeal to him, the more need you should appeal to him!
Shall a man climb the last flight of the stair who has never set foot on the lowest step? He who does the truth in the small thing is of the truth; he who will do it only in a great thing, who postpones the small thing near him to the great things farther from him, is not.
Cleansed of greed, jealousy, vanity, pride, possession, all the thousand forms of the evil self, we shall be God’s children, not one desiring to be before another, any more than to cast that other out; for ambition and hatred will then be seen to be one and the same spirit.
If thou art not willing that God should have his way with thee, then, in the name of God, be miserable—till thy misery drive thee to the arms of the Father...
The things of thy world so crowded our hearts, that there is no room in them for the things of thy heart, which would raise ours above all fear, and make us merry children in our Father’s house! Tomorrow makes today’s whole head sick, its whole heart faint...
In the former case it was the possession of wealth, in the latter the not having more than a loaf, that rendered them incapable of receiving the word of the Lord: the evil principle was precisely the same.
When the Lord reminded them of what their eyes had seen, and so of what he was and what God was, and of the foolishness of their care, the moment their fear was taught to look up, that moment they began to see what the former words of the Lord must have meant...
The Son’s mission was not to show himself as having all power in heaven and earth, but to reveal his Father, to show him to men such as he is, that men may know him, and knowing, trust him.
He does not tell them in so many words where they are wrong; he attacks instead the cause in themselves which led to their mistake—a matter always of infinitely more consequence than any mistake itself, for the one is an untruth in the soul, the other a mere dead blunder born of it.
It is to the man who is obedient to the word of the Master, that the word of the Master unfolds itself. For life, that is, action, is alone the human condition into which the light of the Living can penetrate; life alone can assimilate life, can change food into growth...
