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Quotes by Horace Bushnell
Napoleon was the most effective man in modern times some will say of all times. The secret of his character was, that while his plans were more vast, more various, and, of course, more difficult than those of other men, he had the talent at the same time, to fill them up with perfect promptness and precision, in every particular of execution.— filed under Action
My own experience is that the Bible is dull when I am dull. When I am really alive, and set in upon the text with a tidal pressure of living affinities, it opens, it multiplies discoveries, and reveals depths even faster than I can note them. The worldly spirit shuts the Bible; the Spirit of God makes it a fire, flaming out all meanings and glorious truths.— filed under Bible
There never has been a great and beautiful character, which has not become so by filling well the ordinary and smaller offices appointed of God.— filed under Character
When has the world seen a phenomenon like this? - a lonely uninstructed youth, coming from amid the moral darkness of Galilee, even more distinct from His age, and from every thing around Him, than a Plato would be rising up in some wild tribe in Oregon, assuming thus a position at the head of the world and maintaining it, for eighteen centuries, by the pure self-evidence of His life and doctrine.— filed under Christ's Life and Ministry
Great occasions rally great principles, and brace the mind to a lofty bearing, a bearing that is even above itself. But trials that make no occasion at all, leave it to show the goodness and beauty it has in its own disposition. And here precisely is the superhuman glory of Christ as a character, that He is just as perfect, exhibits just as great a spirit in little trials as in great ones.— filed under Christ's Life and Ministry
It is the grandeur of Christ's character which constitutes the chief power of His ministry, not His miracles or teachings apart from His character. The greatest truth of the gospel is Christ Himself - a human body become the organ of the Divine nature, and revealing, under the conditions of an earthly life, the glory of God.— filed under Christ's Life and Ministry
Christ's sacrifice stands in glorious proportions with the work to be done. Nothing else or less would suffice. It is a work supernatural, transacted in the plane of nature; and what but such a work could restore the broken order of the soul under evil?— filed under Christ's Sufferings and Death
Christ wants to lead men by their love, their personal love to Him, and the confidence of His personal love to them.— filed under Christ the Leader
Jesus is the true manifestation of God, and He is manifested to be the regenerating power of a divine life.— filed under Christ the Saviour
O Thou Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world, what Thou bearest in Thy blessed hands and feet I cannot bear; take it all away. Hide me in the depths of Thy suffering love, mold me to the image of Thy divine passion.— filed under Christ the Saviour
Be sure that Christ is not behind you, but before, calling and drawing you on. This is the liberty, the beautiful liberty of Christ. Claim your glorious privilege in the name of a disciple; be no more a servant, when Christ will own you as a friend.— filed under Christ the Guide
Jesus does not drive His followers on before, as a herd of unwilling disciples, but goes before Himself, leading them into paths that He has trod, and dangers He has met, and sacrifices He has borne Himself, calling them after Him and to be only followers.— filed under Christ the Guide
Christ is known only by them that receive Him into their love, their faith, their deep want; known only as He is enshrined within, felt as a Divine force, breathed in the inspirations of the secret life.— filed under Christ: Way, Truth, Light
God listens for nothing so tenderly, as when His children help each other by their testimonies to His goodness and the way in which He has brought them deliverance.— filed under Christians
Live as with God; and, whatever be your calling, pray for the gift that will perfectly qualify you in it.— filed under Christian Service
Christianity is not so much the advent of a better doctrine as of a perfect character.— filed under Christianity
Christianity is no mere scheme of doctrine or of ethical practice, but is instead a kind of miracle, a power out of nature and above, descending into it; a historically supernatural movement on the world, that is visibly entered into it, and organized to be an institution in the person of Jesus Christ— filed under Christianity
Christ does not dress up a moral picture, and ask you to observe its beauty. He only tells you how to live; and the most beautiful characters the world has ever seen, have been those who received and lived these precepts without once conceiving their beauty. -— filed under Christianity
Persecution has not crushed it, power has not beaten it back, time has not abated its force, and, what is most wonderful of all, the abuses and treasons of its friends have not shaken its stability.— filed under Church
What we want, above all things, in this age is heartiness and holy simplicity; men who justify the holy impulse of grace in their hearts, and do not keep it back by artificial clogs of prudence and false fear, or the sham pretences of fastidiousness and artificial delicacy. These are they whom God will make His witnesses in all ages. They dare to be holy, dare just as readily to be singular. What God puts in them, that they accept; and when He puts a song, they sing it. They know Christ inwardly, and therefore stand for Him outwardly. They endure hardships. They fight a fight. And these are the souls, my brethren, who will stand before God accepted.— filed under Confessing Christ
No man ever truly believed, who was not first made sensible of unbelief. True conviction of sin - how difficult it is, when its appearances and modes of life are so fair, when it twines itself so cunningly about, or creeps so insidiously into, our amiable qualities, and sets off its internal disorders by so many outward charms and attractions.— filed under Conviction
The moment you can make a very simple discovery; viz., that obligation to God is your privilege, and is not imposed as a burden, your experience will teach you many things,- that duty is liberty, that repentance is a release from sorrow, that sacrifice is gain, that humility is dignity, that the truth from which you hide is a healing element that bathes your disordered life, and that even the penalties and terrors of God are the artillery only of protection to His realm.— filed under Duty
In the sacred fact of obligation you touch the immutable, and lay hold, as it were, on the eternities. At the very centre of your being, there is a fixed element, and that of a kind or degree essentially sovereign. A standard is set up in your very thought, by which a great part of your questions are determined, and about which your otherwise random thoughts may settle into order and law.— filed under Duty
We make time for duties we love. Feeble are we? Yes, without God we are nothing. But what, by faith, every man may be, God requires him to be. This is the only Christian idea of duty. Measure obligation by inherent ability! No, my brethren, Christian obligation has a very different measure, It is measured by the power that God will give us, measured by the gifts and possible increments of faith. And what a reckoning will it be for many of us, when Christ summons us to answer before Him under the law, not for what we are, but for what we might have been.— filed under Duty
Take your duty, and be strong in it, as God will make you strong. The harder it is, the stronger in fact you will be. Understand, also, that the great question here is, not what you will get, but what you will become. The greatest wealth you can ever get will be in yourself. Take your burdens and troubles and losses and wrongs, if come they must and will, as your opportunity, knowing that God has girded you for greater things than these.— filed under Duty
Go to your duty, every man, and trust yourself to Christ; for He will give you all supply just as fast as you need it. You will have just as much power as you believe you can have. Be a Christian; throw yourself upon God's work; and get the ability you want in it.— filed under Duty
O, if we could tear aside the vail, and see for but one hour what it signifies to be a soul in the power of an endless life, what a revelation would it be! -— filed under Eternal Life
Faith is the act of trust by which one being, a sinner, commits himself to another being, a Saviour.— filed under Faith In Christ
Go to the cross, and meet there God in sacrifice. Behold Him as Jesus bearing your sin, receiving the shafts of your enmity! Embrace Him, believe in Him, take Him to your inmost heart. Do this, and you shall feel sin die within you, and a glorious quickening, Christ the power of God, Christ in you the hope of glory, shall be consciously risen upon you, as the morn of your new creation.— filed under Faith In Christ
If you could once get away, my friends, from that sense of mediocrity and nothingness to which you are shut up, under the stupor of your self-seeking and your sin, how easy would it be for you to believe! Nay, if but some faintest suspicion could steal into you of what your soul is, and the tremendous evils working in it, nothing but the mystery of Christ's death and passion would be sufficient for you.— filed under Faith In Christ
We shall never recover the true apostolic energy, and be endued with power from on high, as the first disciples were, till we recover the lost faith. -— filed under Faith In Christ
The secret of all our dryness, the root of all our weakness, our want of fruit and progress, our dearth and desolation, is, that we do not follow Christ. First, we do not believe that He has any particular care of us, or personal interest in our lives, and then, falling away at that point from His lead, we drop into ourselves, to do a few casual works of duty, in which neither we nor others are greatly blessed.— filed under Following Jesus
However dark our lot may be, there is light enough on the other side of the cloud, in that pure empyrean where God dwells, to irradiate every darkness of this world; light enough to clear every difficult question, remove every ground of obscurity, conquer every atheistic suspicion, silence every hard judgment, light enough to satisfy, nay, to ravish the mind forever.— filed under God's Omniscience
Be an observer of providence; for God is showing you ever, by the way in which He leads you, whither He means to lead. Study your trials, your talents, the world's wants, and stand ready to serve God now, in whatever He brings to your hand.— filed under God's Providence
It is the grand endeavor of the gospel to communicate God to men.— filed under Gospel
The sacrifices required in the Christian life are necessary to emancipate the soul, and raise it above its servile dependence on condition. They are losses of mere happiness, and for just that reason they are preparations of joy.— filed under Happiness
Man has in his power, now developed, nothing more than a mere hint or initial sign of what is to be the real stature of his personality in the process of his everlasting development. We exist here only in the small, that God may have us in a state of flexibility, and bend or fashion us, at the best advantage, to the model of His own great life and character. -— filed under Heaven
It doth not yet appear what we shall be. We lie here in our nest, unfledged and weak, guessing dimly at our future, and scarce believing what even now appears. But the power is in us, and that power is finally to be revealed. And what a revelation will that be!— filed under Heaven
The Bible calls the good man's life a light; and it is the nature of light to flow out spontaneously in all directions, and fill the world unconsciously with its beams. So the Christian shines it would say, not so much because he will, as because he is a luminous object. Not that the active influence of Christians is made of no account in the figure, but only that this symbol of light has its propriety in the fact that their unconscious influence is the chief influence, and has the precedence in its power over the world. The outward endeavors made by good men or bad to sway others, they call their influence; whereas it is, in fact, but a fraction, and, in most cases, but a very small fraction of the good or evil that flows out of their lives.— filed under Influence
If you had the seeds of a pestilence in your body, you would not have a more active contagion than you have in your tempers, tastes, and principles. Simply to be in this world, whatever you are, is to exert an influence - an influence, too, compared with which mere language and persuasion are feeble.— filed under Influence
When we speak of joy, we do not speak of something we are after, but of something that will come to us, when we are after God and duty. It is a prize unbought, and is freest, purest in its flow, when it comes unsought. No getting into heaven as a place will compass it. You must carry it with you, or else it is not there. You must have it in you, as the music of a wellordered soul, the fire of a holy purpose, the welling up, out of the central depths, of eternal springs that hide their waters there. It is the rest of confidence, the blessedness of eternal light and outflowing benevolence, - the highest form of life and spiritual majesty. Being the birth of character, it has eternity in it. Rising from within, it is sovereign over all circumstances and hindrances. -— filed under Joy
The reason why those who are converted to Christ often make so poor a work of rectifying their old habits, is that they lay down their work in the very places where it needs to be prosecuted most carefully, that is, in their common employments. They do not live to God in that which is least.— filed under Little Things
We are to work after no set fashion of high endeavor; but to walk with Jesus, performing, as it were, a ministry on foot, that we may stop at the humblest matter, and prove our fidelity there.— filed under Little Things
Nature - faint emblem of Omnipotence ! Shaped by His hand - the shadow of His light - The veil in which He wraps His majesty. Call nature the grand revelation! Is it more to go to nature and know it than to know God? Are there deeper depths in nature, higher sublimities, thoughts more captivating and glorious? In the mineral and vegetable shapes are there finer themes than in the life of Jesus? In the storms and glorious pilings of the clouds, are there manifestations of greatness and beauty more impressive than in the tragic sceneries of the cross? Nature is the realm of things, the supernatural is the realm of powers.— filed under Nature
A true Christian man is distinguished from other men, not so much by his beneficent works, as by his patience.— filed under Patience
Christ commands you to take up His cross and follow Him, not that He may humble you, or lay some penance upon you, but that you may surrender the low self-will and the feeble pride of your sin, and ascend into the sublime patience of heavenly charity. -— filed under Patience
It is not necessary for all men to be great in action. The greatest and sublimest power is often simple patience.— filed under Patience
O, if there be any kind of life most sad, and deepest in the scale of pity, it is the dry, cold impotence of one, who has honestly set to the work of his own self-redemption.— filed under Redemption
Christ is redemption only as He actually redeems and delivers our nature from sin. If He is not the law and spring of a new spirit of life, He is nothing. "As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God," -- as many, no more.— filed under Redemption
It is only religion, the great bond of love and duty to God, that makes any existence valuable or even tolerable. Without this, to live were only to graze. Without this, the beauties of the world are but splendid gewgaws, the stars of heaven glittering orbs of ice, and, what is yet far worse and colder, the trials of existence profitless and unadulterated miseries. - -— filed under Religion
Religion converts despair, which destroys, into resignation, which submits. What but the mighty mastership of religion has ever led a people up through civil wars and revolutions into a regenerated order and liberty? What has planted colonies for a great history but religion? The most august and beautiful structures of the world have been temples of religion, crystallizations, we may say, of worship. The noblest charities, the best fruits of learning, the richest discoveries, the best institutions of law and justice, every greatest thing the world has seen, represents more or less directly the fruitfulness and creativeness of religion.— filed under Religion
God has promised to forgive the penitent. He has pledged His word that the act of forgiveness on His part shall follow the exercise of repentance on yours. Returning prodigal, pardoning mercy is thine. It is as sure as the sincerity of thy repentance. Come back then, O, thou prodigal, to thy Father. Quit thy sad folly and emptiness, thy reproaches of soul, thy diseased longings, and thy restless sighs. Return again to thy God, and Conquer give thyself to Him in a final and last sacrifice. again, as Christ will help you, the original love, in that to abide and rest.— filed under Repentance
The resurrection morning is a true sun-rising, the inbursting of a cloudless sky on all the righteous dead. They wake transfigured, at their Maker's call, with the fashion of their countenance altered and shining like His own.— filed under Resurrection
Sin works by no set methods. It has a way of ruin for every man, that is original and proper only to himself. Suffice it to say that, as long as you are in and under its power, you can never tell what you are in danger of. This one thing you may have as a truth eternally fixed, that respectable sin is, in principle, the mother of all basest crime. Follow it on to the bitter end, and there is ignominy eternal.— filed under Sin
Nature has no promise for society, least of all, any remedy for sin. -— filed under Sin
"Take therefore the talent from him." It is being taken away rapidly, and the shreds of it will very soon be all that is left. Your religious nature will finally become a virtually exterminated organ. The purpose you have at some future time to use your talent avails nothing. It is going from you, and, before you know it, will be utterly, irrevocably gone. My friends, there is not an hour to lose. Only with the greatest difficulty will you be able, now, to gather up yourself and open your closing gates to the entrance of God and His salvation.— filed under Temperance
By His trials, God means to purify us, to take away all our self-confidence, and our trust in each other, and bring us into implicit, humble trust in Himself.— filed under Trials
We come, in our trust, unto God, and the moment we so embrace Him, by committing our total being and eternity to Him, we find every thing is transformed. There is life in us from God; a kind of Christ-consciousness is opened in us, testifying with the apostle, - Christ liveth in me.— filed under Trust In God
Trust in God for great things. With your five loaves and two fishes He will show you a way to feed thousands.— filed under Trust In God
As long as we abide in Christ, our action is from Him, not from our own corrupt and broken nature.— filed under Union To Christ
Our communion with Christ is not on a level of our common humanity, but we rise in it; we scale the heavens where He sitteth at the right hand of God; we send our longings up and ask to have attachments knit to Him; to be set in deepest, holiest, and most practical affinity with Him; and so to live a life that is hid with Christ in God. In such a life, we become partakers of His holiness, and, in the separating grace of that, partakers also of His power. -— filed under Union To Christ
No state of virtue is complete, however total the virtue, save as it is won by a conflict with evil, and fortified by the struggles of a resolute and even bitter experience.— filed under Virtue