Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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

Holiness

It must be a prospect pleasing to God himself to see his creation forever beautifying in his eyes, and drawing nearer to him by greater degrees of resemblance.

Man’s nature, being contrary to holiness, hath an aversion to any act of homage to God, because holiness must at least be pretended. In every duty wherein we have a communion with God, holiness is requisite: now, as men are against the truth of holiness, because it is unsuitable to them, so they are not friends to those duties which require it and for some space divert them from the thoughts of their beloved lusts. The word of the Lord is a yoke, prayer a drudgery, obedience a strange element. We are like fish, that “drink up iniquity like water,” and come not to the bank without the force of an angle; no more willing to do service for God, than a fish is of itself to do service for man.

What though the polite man count thy fashion a little odd, and too precise; it is because he knows nothing above that model of goodness which he hath set himself, and therefore approves of nothing beyond it: he knows not God, and therefore doth not discern and esteem what is most like Him. When courtiers come down into the country, the common home-bred people possibly think their habit strange; but they care not for that—it is the fashion at court. What need, then, that Christians should be so tender-foreheaded as to be put out of countenance because the world looks upon holiness as a singularity? It is the only fashion in the highest court, yea, of the King of kings himself.

It is of things heavenly an universal declaration, working in them whose hearts God inspireth with the due consideration thereof, an habit or disposition of mind whereby they are made fit vessels both for the receipt and delivery of whatsoever spiritual perfection.

Blessed is the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted from the world! Yet more blessed and more the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted in the world!

When the Spirit brings light into our minds, it dispels darkness: we see it as we do that of the sun at noon, and need not the twilight of reason to show it.

Let a man be very tender and regardful of every pious motion made by the Spirit of God to his heart.

As God sometimes addresses himself in this manner to the hearts of men, so if the heart will receive such motions by a ready compliance they will return more frequently, and still more and more powerfully.

It is not every sinful violation of conscience that can quench the spirit, but it must be a long inveterate course and custom of sinning that at length produces and ends in such a cursed effect.

Those who have never tried the experiment of a holy life measure the laws of God not by their intrinsical goodness, but by the reluctancy and opposition which they find in their own hearts.