C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Mountford
Day and night, and every moment, there are voices about us. All the hours speak as they pass; and in every event there is a message to us; and all our circumstances talk with us; but it is in Divine language, that worldliness misunderstands, that selfishness is frightened at, and that only the children of God hear rightly and happily.
Do we not hear voices, gentle and great, and some of them like the voices of departed friends—do we not hear them saying to us, “Come up hither?”
Eternity is the divine treasure-house and hope is the window, by means of which mortals are permitted to see, as through a glass darkly, the things which God is preparing.
Faith is the inspiration of nobleness, it is the strength of integrity; it is the life of love, and is everlasting growth for it; it is courage of soul, and bridges over for our crossing the gulf between worldliness and heavenly-mindedness; and it is the sense of the unseen, without which we could not feel God nor hope for heaven.
For every grain of sand is a mystery; so is every daisy in summer, and so is every snow-flake in winter. Both upwards and downwards, and all around us, science and speculation pass into mystery at last.
For knowledge to become wisdom, and for the soul to grow, the soul must be rooted in God: and it is through prayer that there comes to us that which is the strength of our strength, and the virtue of our virtue, the Holy Spirit.
I do not say the mind gets informed by action, bodily action; but it does set earnestness and strength by it, and that nameless something that gives a man the mastership of his faculties.
It is our souls which are the everlastingness of God’s purpose in this earth.
It would not be more unreasonable to transplant a favorite flower out of black earth into gold dust than it is for a person to let money-getting harden his heart into contempt, or into impatience, of the little attentions, the merriments and the caresses of domestic life.
Let a disciple live as Christ lived, and he will easily believe in living again as Christ does.
Let God do with me what He will, anything He will; and whatever it be, it will be either heaven itself, or some beginning of it.
Men would not be so hasty to abandon the world either as monks or as suicides, did they but see the jewels of wisdom and faith which are scattered so plentifully along its paths; and lacking which no soul can come again from beyond the grave to gather.
The day of our decease will be that of our coming of age; and with our last breath we shall become free of the universe. And in some region of infinity, and from among its splendors, this earth will be looked back on like a lowly home, and this life of ours be remembered like a short apprenticeship to duty.
The light of genius is sometimes so resplendent as to make a man walk through life, amid glory and acclamation; but it burns very dimly and low when carried into “the valley of the shadow of death.” But faith is like the evening star, shining into our souls the more brightly, the deeper is the night of death in which they sink.
The second childhood of a saint is the early infancy of a happy immortality, as we believe.
There is no burden of the spirit but is lightened by kneeling under it. Little by little, the bitterest feelings are sweetened by the mention of them in prayer. And agony itself stops swelling, if we can only cry sincerely, “My God, my God!”
To commiserate is sometimes more than to give; for money is external to a man’s self, but he who bestows compassion communicates his own soul.
With a mind not diseased, a holy life is a life of hope; and at the end of it, death is a great act of hope.
Yes, death—the hourly possibility of it—death is the sublimity of life.
Yes, I live in God, and shall eternally. It is His hand upholds me now; and death will be but an uplifting of me into His bosom.
Yes, what I am to be everlastingly, I am growing to be now—now in this present time so little thought of, this time which the sun rises and sets in, and the clock strikes in, and I wake and sleep in.