Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Christ
There is a green hill far away,
Without a city wall,
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.
Cecil Frances Alexander—There is a Green Hill.
Hail, O bleeding Head and wounded,
With a crown of thorns surrounded,
Buffeted, and bruised and battered,
Smote with reed by striking shattered,
Face with spittle vilely smeared!
Hail, whose visage sweet and comely,
Marred by fouling stains and homely,
Changed as to its blooming color,
All now turned to deathly pallor,
Making heavenly hosts affeared!
St. Bernard of Clairvaux—Passion Hymn. Abraham Coles’ trans.
In every pang that rends the heart
The Man of Sorrows had a part.
Michael Bruce—Gospel Sonnets. Christ Ascended. Attributed to John Logan, who issued the poems with emendations of his own. “Every pang that rends the heart.” See also Goldsmith—The Captivity.
Lovely was the death
Of Him whose life was Love! Holy with power,
He on the thought-benighted Skeptic beamed
Manifest Godhead.
Coleridge—Religious Musings. L. 29.
A pagan heart, a Christian soul had he.
He followed Christ, yet for dead Pan he sighed,
As if Theocritus in Sicily
Had come upon the Figure crucified,
And lost his gods in deep, Christ-given rest.
Maurice Francis Egan—Maurice de Gu
rin.
Fra Lippo, we have learned from thee
A lesson of humanity:
To every mother’s heart forlorn,
In every house the Christ is born.
R. W. Gilder—A Madonna of Fra Lippo Lippi.
In darkness there is no choice. It is light that enables us to see the differences between things; and it is Christ that gives us light.
J. C. and A. W. Hare—Guesses at Truth.
Who did leave His Father’s throne,
To assume thy flesh and bone?
Had He life, or had He none?
If he had not liv’d for thee,
Thou hadst died most wretchedly
And two deaths had been thy fee.
Herbert—The Church. Business.
Vicisti, Galliloæ.
Thou hast conquered, O Galilæan.
Attributed to Julian the Apostate. Montaigne—Essays. Bk. II. Ch. XIX. Claim dismissed by German and French scholars. Emperor Justinian at the dedication of the Cathedral of St. Sophia, built on the plan of the Temple of Jerusalem, said: “I have vanquished thee, O Solomon.”
All His glory and beauty come from within, and there He delights to dwell, His visits there are frequent, His conversation sweet, His comforts refreshing; and His peace passing all understanding.
Thomas à Kempis—Imitation of Christ. Bk. II. Ch. I. Dibdin’s trans.
Into the woods, my Master went,
Clean forspent, forspent.
Into the woods my Master came,
Forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to Him,
The little gray leaves were kind to Him:
The thorn-tree had a mind to Him,
When into the woods He came.
Sidney Lanier—A Ballad of Trees and the Master.
God never gave man a thing to do concerning which it were irreverent to ponder how the Son of God would have done it.
George Macdonald—The Marquis of Lossie. Vol. II. Ch. XVII.
The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.
Matthew. VIII. 20.
The Pilot of the Galilean Lake.
Milton—Lycidas. L. 109.
Near, so very near to God,
Nearer I cannot be;
For in the person of his Son
I am as near as he.
Catesby Paget—Hymn.
But chiefly Thou,
Whom soft-eyed Pity once led down from Heaven
To bleed for man, to teach him how to live,
And, oh! still harder lesson! how to die.
Bishop Porteus—Death. L. 316.
In those holy fields.
Over whose acres walk’d those blessed feet
Which, fourteen hundred years ago, were nail’d
For our advantage on the bitter cross.
Henry IV. Pt. I. Act I. Sc. 1. L. 24.
And on his brest a bloodie crosse he bore,
The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,
For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore.
Spenser—Faerie Queene. Bk. I. Canto I. St. 2.
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean;
The world has grown gray from thy breath;
We have drunken from things Lethean,
And fed on the fullness of death.
Swinburne—Hymn to Proserpine.
And so the Word had breath, and wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds
In loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thoughts;
Which he may read that binds the sheaf,
Or builds the house, or digs the grave,
And those wild eyes that watch the waves
In roarings round the coral reef.
Tennyson—In Memoriam. XXXVI.
His love at once and dread instruct our thought;
As man He suffer’d and as God He taught.
Edmund Waller—Of Divine Love. Canto III. L. 41.