C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Aughey
A cheerful spirit is one of the most valuable gifts ever bestowed upon humanity by a kind Creator. It is the sweetest and most fragrant flower of the Spirit, that constantly sends out its beauty and fragrance, and blesses everything within its reach. It will sustain the soul in the darkest and most dreary places of this world. It will hold in check the demons of despair, and stifle the power of discouragement and hopelessness. It is the brightest star that ever cast its radiance over the darkened soul, and one that seldom sets in the gloom of morbid fancies and forboding imaginations.
A firm faith is the best theology; a good life is the best philosophy; a clear conscience the best law; honesty the best policy, and temperance the best physic.
A hope unaccompanied with a godly life had better be given up, and the sooner the better; for, if retained, it will prove as a spider’s web when God shall take away the soul.
A little thing will keep them from the house of God who have no desire to go to it.
Afflictions are but conductors to immortal life and glory.
All Christian power springs from communion with God, and from the indwelling of divine grace.
All our murmurings are so many arrows shot at God Himself, and they will return upon our own hearts; they reach not Him, but they will hit us; they hurt not Him, but they will wound us; therefore it is better to be mute than to murmur; it is dangerous to provoke a consuming fire.
As a weak limb grows stronger by exercise, so will your faith be strengthened by the very efforts you make in stretching it out toward things unseen.
As every mercy is a drop obtained from the ocean of God’s goodness, so every affliction is a drachm weighed out in the wisdom of God’s providence.
Be deaf to the quarrelsome, blind to the scorner and dumb to the inquisitive.
Cheerfulness is the friend and helper of all good graces, and the absence of it is certainly a vice.
Cheerfulness sharpens the edge and removes the rust from the mind. A joyous heart supplies oil to our inward machinery, and makes the whole of our powers work with ease and efficiency; hence it is of the utmost importance that we maintain a contented, cheerful, genial disposition.
Christ is the Good Physician. There is no disease He cannot heal; no sin He cannot remove; no trouble He cannot help. He is the Balm of Gilead, the Great Physician who has never yet failed to heal all the spiritual maladies of every soul that has come unto Him in faith and prayer.
Conscience is the voice of God in the soul.
Death to the Christian is the funeral of all his sorrows and evils, and the resurrection of all his joys.
Debt is the secret foe of thrift, as vice and idleness are its open enemies.
Difficulty excites the mind to the dignity which sustains and finally conquers misfortunes, and the ordeal refines while it chastens.
Do daily and hourly your duty; do it patiently and thoroughly. Do it as it presents itself; do it at the moment, and let it be its own reward. Never mind whether it is known and acknowledged or not, but do not fail to do it.
Each evening we should meditate upon the fact that one more day is gone from the list that make up the sum of our years. We have one day less for the seeking and finding Christ; for cultivating the spirit of holiness in our hearts, for blessing society, building up the church, gathering sinners to the Savior, and promoting the glory of God. By so much the time is shortened that separates us from the grave, the judgment and the eternal destiny.
Faith without evidence is, properly, not faith, but prejudice or presumption; faith beyond evidence is superstition, and faith contrary to evidence is either insanity or willful perversity of mind.
Five, or six, or ten people shall be made temporarily wretched because one person, unconsciously perhaps, yet supremely egotistic and selfish, has never learned to control his disposition and bridle his tongue.
God brings men into deep waters, not to drown them, but to cleanse them.
God makes crosses of great variety; He makes some of iron and lead, that look as if they must crush; some of straw, that seem so light, and yet are no less difficult to carry; some He makes of precious stones and gold, that dazzle the eye and excite the envy of spectators, but in reality are as well able to crucify as those which are so much dreaded.
God strikes not as an enemy, to destroy; but as a father, to correct.
God’s corrections are our instructions; His lashes our lessons, and His scourges our schoolmasters.
Good conscience is sometimes sold for money, but never bought with it.
Great things are not accomplished by idle dreams, but by years of patient study.
Happiness and comfort stream immediately from God himself, as light issues from the sun; and sometimes looks and darts itself into the meanest corners, while it forbears to visit the largest and the noblest rooms.
Happiness without peace is temporal; peace along with happiness is eternal.
He that has never known adversity is but half acquainted with others or himself.
He who bears failure with patience is as much of a philosopher as he who succeeds; for to put up with the world needs as much wisdom as to control it.
Holiness consists of three things—separation from sin, dedication to God, transformation into Christ’s image. It is in vain that we talk about the last, unless we know something experimentally about the first.
Hope is the last lingering light of the human heart. It shines when every other is put out. Extinguish it, and the gloom of affliction becomes the very blackness of darkness—cheerless and impenetrable.
I have seen many men and women of fashion die, and I never saw one of them die well. The trappings off, there they lay on the tumbled pillow, and there were just two things that bothered them, a wasted life and a coming eternity.
In the Church of Christ one little worker can mar the whole by failing to fulfill his office. There is a place for each. Find your place if you are not already in it, and obey the Saviour’s command, “Go work in my vineyard”—the command of a king which you disobey at the peril of losing the reward of the faithful.
It is a high, solemn, almost awful thought for every individual man, that his earthly influence, which has a commencement, will never, through all ages, have an end.
It is not affliction itself, but affliction rightly borne, that does us good.
It is one of the worst of errors to suppose that there is any other path of safety except that of duty.
It unfortunately happens that no man believes that he is likely to die soon. So every one is much disposed to defer the consideration of what ought to be done on the supposition of such an emergency; and while nothing is so uncertain as human life, so nothing is so certain as our assurance that we shall survive most of our neighbors.
Jesus organized the church, which is His vineyard. He commands all to go into the vineyard and work. All who are united to Christ by faith, and are thus members of His mystical body, should be members of His visible church.
Let not the stream of your life be a murmuring stream.
Lost time is never found again.
Many men affect to despise fear, and in preaching resent any appeal to it; but not to fear when there is occasion is as great a weakness as to fear unduly without reason. God implanted fear in the soul as truly as He implanted hope or courage.
No books are so legible as the lives of men; no character so plain as their moral conduct.
None should expect to prosper who go out of the way of duty.
Nothing is eternal but that which is done for God and others. That which is done for self dies.
On the head of Christ are many crowns. He wears the crown of victory; He wears the crown of sovereignty; He wears the crown of creation; He wears the crown of providence; He wears the crown of grace; He wears the crown of glory—for every one of His glorified people owes his honor, happiness and blessedness to Him.
One improper word or act will neutralize the effect of many good ones; and one base deed, after years of noble service, will cover them all with shame.
Open your heart to sympathy, but close it against despondency. The flower which opens to receive the dew shuts against the rain.
Our Christianity is a name, a shadow, unless we resemble Him who, being the incarnate God, was incarnate goodness.
Our religion is not Christianity so much as Christ. Our gospel is the knowledge, not of a system, but the saving knowledge of a personal Saviour.
Palaces and pyramids are reared by laying one brick, or block, at a time; and the kingdom of Christ is enlarged by individual conversions.
Remember that holiness is not the way to Christ, but Christ is the way to holiness.
Sensual pleasures are like soap-bubbles, sparkling, evanescent. The pleasures of intellect are calm, beautiful, sublime, ever enduring and climbing upward to the borders of the unseen world.
Should you suffer your weary soul this day to sink into the arms of that Saviour who rejoices to pardon and is mighty to save, the first entrance of such a word, and the first response of such a faith, would be the date of your better life and the commencement of your union to Christ. The graft has taken. At first the juncture may be very slight—a single thread or fiber—and it is not till you try to part them that you find that they are knit together; that their life is one, and that the force which plucks away the graft must also wound the vine. And your faith may yet be no more than a single filament. It may be only one point of attachment by which you are joined to the Lord Jesus. It may be only one solitary sentence, one isolated invitation or promise, of which you have undoubting hold. But hold it fast. If it be the word of Jesus, cling to it.
Sorrow comes soon enough without despondency, It does a man no good to carry around a lightning-rod to attract trouble.
The ability to find fault is believed, by some people, to be a sure sign of great wisdom, when, in most cases, it only indicates narrowness of mind and ill nature.
The chief secret of comfort lies in not suffering trifles to vex us, and in prudently cultivating an undergrowth of small pleasures, since very few great ones are let on long leases.
The church is made up of individuals. It can do nothing except as its members work, and work together.
The church is not a select circle of the immaculate, but a home where the outcast may come in. It is not a palace with gate attendants and challenging sentinels along the entrance-ways holding off at arm’s-length the stranger, but rather a hospital where the broken-hearted may be healed, and where all the weary and troubled may find rest and take counsel together.
The great comprehensive truths written in letters of living light on every page of our history are these: Human happiness has no perfect security but freedom; freedom none but virtue; virtue none but knowledge; and neither freedom nor virtue has any vigor of immortal hope, except in the principles of Christian faith, and in the sanctions of the Christian religion.
The mission of the Church is to seek and to save them that are lost.
The most generous and merciful in judgment upon the faults of others, are always the most free from faults themselves.
The most holy men are always the most humble men; none so humble on earth as those that live highest in heaven.
The soul is the life of the body, faith is the life of the soul, and Christ is the life of faith. Justification by faith in Christ’s righteousness is the golden chain which binds the Christian world in one body.
The wisdom of God appears in afflictions. By these He separates the sin which He hates, from the son whom He loves. By these thorns He keeps him from breaking over into Satan’s pleasant pastures, which would fatten him indeed, but only to the slaughter.
There are many seasons in a man’s life—and the more exalted and responsible his position, the more frequently do these seasons recur—when the voice of duty and the dictates of feeling are opposed to each other; and it is only the weak and the wicked who yield that obedience to the selfish impulses of the heart which is due to reason and honor.
There is dew in one flower and not in another, because one opens its cup and takes it in, while the other closes itself and the drop runs off. So God rains goodness and mercy as wide as the dew, and if we lack them, it is because we do not open our hearts to receive them.
There is no man that goeth to heaven but he must go by the cross. The cross is the standing way-mark which all they that go to glory must pass by.
This is one of the sad conditions of life, that experience is not transmissible. No man will learn from the suffering of another; he must suffer himself.
Were it not for an unquestioning faith, human progress would be an intolerable burden.
When our will runs parallel with the will of God, no cross is formed; but when our will runs counter to God’s will, a cross is formed which is heavy to be borne.
Where science speaks of improvement, Christianity speaks of renovation; where science speaks of development, Christianity speaks of sanctification; where science speaks of progress, Christianity speaks of perfection.
Ye do well to remember that habitual affectionate communion with God, asking Him for all good which is needed, praising Him for all that is received, and trusting Him for future supplies, prevents anxious cares, inspires peace, calmness and composure, and furnishes a delight surpassing all finite comprehension.
Youth, beauty, wit may recommend you to men, but only faith in Jesus Christ can recommend you to God.