Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Henry Hammond

The time of sickness or affliction is like the cool of the day to Adam, a season of peculiar propriety for the voice of God to be heard; and may be improved into a very advantageous opportunity of begetting or increasing spiritual life.

Their sins have the aggravation of being sins against grace, and forsaking and departing from God; which respect makes the state apostate, as the most unexcusable, so the most desperately dangerous, state.

Revelation will soon be discerned to be extremely conducible to reforming men’s lives, such as will answer all objections and exceptions of flesh and blood against it.

If we can return to that charity and peaceable-mindedness which Christ so vehemently recommended to us, we have his own promise that the whole body will be full of light, Matth. vi.; that all other Christian virtues will, by way of recommittance or annexation, attend them.

All the decrees whereof Scripture treateth are conditionate, receiving Christ as the gospel offers him, as Lord and Saviour; the former, as well as the latter, being the condition of Scripture election, and the rejecting, or not receiving him thus, the condition of the Scripture reprobation.

The end of his descent was to gather a church of holy Christian livers over the whole world.

If he sets industriously and sincerely to perform the commands of Christ, he can have no ground of doubting but it shall prove successful to him.

The prime act and evidence of the Christian hope is to set industriously and piously to the performance of that condition on which the promise is made.

What is sorrow and contrition for sin? A being grieved with the conscience of sin, not only that we have thereby incurred such danger, but also that we have so unkindly grieved and provoked so good a God.

What is it but a continued perpetual voice from heaven, to give men no rest in their sins, no quiet from Christ’s importunity, till they awake from the lethargic sleep, and arise from so dead, so mortiferous a state, and permit him to give them life?

These by obtruding the beginning of a change for the entire work of new life will fall under the former guilt.

One sign of despair is the peremptory contempt of the condition which is the ground of hope; the going on not only in terrors and amazement of conscience, but also boldly, hopingly, and confidently, in wilful habits of sin.

The very dogmatizer that teacheth for doctrines or commandments of God his own dictates.

Were our rewards for the abstinencies or riots of this present life under the prejudices of short or finite, the promises and threats of Christ would lose of their virtue and energy.

Such are Christ’s promises, divine inconceivable promises; a bliss to be enjoyed to all eternity, and that by way of return for a weak obedience of some few years.

Faith is cordial, and such as God will accept of, when it affords fiducial reliance on the promises, and obediential submission to the commandments.

God’s … prescience or foresight of any action of mine, or rather his science or sight from all eternity, lays no necessity on anything to come to pass.

The thinking it impossible his sins should be forgiven, though he should be truly penitent, is a sin, but rather of infidelity than despair; it being the disbelieving of an eternal truth of God’s.

This predetermination of God’s own will is so far from being the determining of ours, that it is distinctly the contrary; for supposing God to predetermine that I shall act freely, ’tis certain from thence that my will is free in respect of God, and not predetermined.

God’s foreseeing doth not include or connotate pre-determining, any more than I decree with my intellect.

’Tis as certainly conclusible from God’s prescience that they will voluntarily do this as that they will do it at all.

If mankind had no power to avoid ill or choose good by free deliberation, it should never be guilty of anything that was done.

The everlasting life, both of body and soul, in that future state, whether in bliss or woe, hath been added.

God will protect and reward all his faithful servants in a manner and measure inexpressibly abundant.

God’s grace, that principle of his new birth, gives him continual dislike to sin.

That grace will carry us, if we do not wilfully betray our succours, victoriously through all difficulties.

If shame superadded to loss, and both met together, as the sinner’s portion here, perfectly prefiguring the two saddest ingredients in hell,—deprivation of the blissful vision, and confusion of face,—cannot prove efficacious to the mortifying of vice, the church doth give over the patient.

Humility is a seedplot of virtue, especially Christian, which thrives best when ’tis deep rooted in the humble lowly heart.

All the divine and infinitely wise ways of economy that God could use towards a rational creature oblige mankind to that course of living which is most agreeable to our nature.

Literature is the grindstone to sharpen the coulters, and to whet their natural faculties.

Love is of two sorts, of friendship and of desire; the one betwixt friends, the other betwixt lovers; the one a rational, the other a sensitive love: so our love of God consists of two parts, as esteeming of God, and desiring of him.

Meditation will radicate these seeds, fix the transient gleam of light and warmth, confirm resolutions of good, and give them a double consistence in the soul.

The oracle was enforced to proclaim Socrates to be the wisest man in the world; because he applied his studies to the moral part, the squaring men’s lives.

God hath taken care to anticipate and prevent every man to give piety the prepossession before other competitors should be able to pretend to him; and so to engage him in holiness first, and then in bliss.

Many times that which we ask would if it should be granted be worse for us, and perhaps tend to our destruction; and then God by denying the particular matter of our prayers doth grant the general matter of them.

Predestination is destructive to all that is established among men, to all that is most precious to human nature, to the two faculties that denominate us men, understanding and will: for what use can we have of our understandings if we cannot do what we know to be our duty? And if we act not voluntarily, what exercise have we of our wills?

What should make it necessary for him to repent or amend, who, either without respect to any degree of amendment, is supposed to be elected to eternal bliss, or without respect to sin, to be irreversibly reprobated?

This doctrine, by fastening all our actions by a fatal decree at the foot of God’s chair, leaves nothing to us but only to obey our fate, to follow the duct of the stars, or necessity of those iron chains which we are born under.

God’s prescience, from all eternity, being but the seeing everything that ever exists as it is, contingents as contingents, necessary as necessary, can neither work any change in the object by thus seeing it, nor itself be deceived in what it sees.

Pride goes hated, cursed, and abominated by all.

The only seasonable inquiry is, Which is of probables the most, or of improbables the least, such?

Prophecies of him which were so clear, and descended to minutes and circumstances of his passion.

The Jewish nation that rejected and crucified him, within the compass of one generation were, according to his prediction, destroyed by the Romans, and preyed upon by those eagles (Matt. xxiv. 28) by which, allusively, are noted the Roman armies, whose ensign was the eagle.

How great soever the sins of any unreformed person are, Christ died for him, because he died for all: only he must reform and forsake his sins, or else he shall never receive benefit of his death.

Repentance is a change of mind, or a conversion from sin to God: not some one bare act of change, but a lasting, durable state of new life, which is called regeneration.

For any man to put off his present repentance on contemplation of a possibility that his latter repentance may serve the turn, is the most wretchless presumption, and hath no promise of mercy annexed to it.

Resolve rather to err by too much flexibility than too much perverseness, by meekness than by self-love.

Sin is the contrariety to the will of God, and if all things be preordained by God, and so demonstrated to be willed by him, it remains there is no such thing as sin.

He to the sins which he commits hath the aggravation superadded of committing them against knowledge, against conscience, against sight of the contrary law.

This going on not only in terrors and amazement of conscience, but also boldly, hopingly, confidently, in wilful habits of sin, is called a desperateness also; and the more bold thus, the more desperate.

How great soever the sins of any person are, Christ died for him, because he died for all; and he died for those sins because he died for all sins: only he must reform.

Use the means ordinary and lawful, among which mercifulness and liberality is one, to which the promise of secular wealth is most frequently made.

Eternal bliss is not immediately superstructed on the most orthodox beliefs; but, as our Saviour saith, If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them; the doing must be first superstructed on the knowing or believing, before any happiness can be built on it.

This is not the grace of hope, but a good natural assurance or confidence, which Aristotle observes young men to be full of, and old men not so inclined to.

That he shall receive no benefit from Christ is the affirmation whereon his despair is founded; and one way of removing this dismal apprehension is, to convince him that Christ’s death (if he perform the condition required) shall certainly belong to him.

Piety is the necessary Christian virtue proportioned adequately to the omniscience and spirituality of that infinite Deity.

Religion receives man into a covenant of grace, where there is a pardon reached out to all truly penitent sinners, and assistance promised, and engaged, and bestowed, upon very easy conditions; viz., humility, prayer, and affiance in him.