Horace Bushnell Quotes
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Nothing is necessary for you in maintaining a Christian life, but just to stay by the helm, and put yourself where the power is. Come unto God, unite yourself to God, and the doing power you have is infinite.
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If you had the seeds of pestilence in your body you would not have a more active contagion that you have in your tempers, tastes, and principles. Simply to be in this world, whatever you are, is to exert an influence, compared with which mere language and persuasion are feeble.
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God listens for nothing so tenderly, as when His children help each other by their testimonies to His goodness and the way in which He has brought them deliverance.
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A true Christian man is distinguished from other men, not so much by his beneficent works, as by his patience.
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Persecution has not crushed it, power has not beaten it back, time has not abated its force, and, what is most wonderful of all, the abuses and treasons of its friends have not shaken its stability.
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The resurrection morning is a true sun-rising, the inbursting of a cloudless sky on all the righteous dead. They wake transfigured, at their Maker's call, with the fashion of their countenance altered and shining like His own.
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Great occasions rally great principles, and brace the mind to a lofty bearing, a bearing that is even above itself. But trials that make no occasion at all, leave it to show the goodness and beauty it has in its own disposition. And here precisely is the superhuman glory of Christ as a character, that He is just as perfect, exhibits just as great a spirit in little trials as in great ones.
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Christ is redemption only as He actually redeems and delivers our nature from sin. If He is not the law and spring of a new spirit of life, He is nothing. "As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God," as many, no more.
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To understand a philosopher requires a philosopher.
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Christianity is not so much the advent of a better doctrine as of a perfect character.
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O, if we could tear aside the vail, and see for but one hour what it signifies to be a soul in the power of an endless life, what a revelation would it be!
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Faith is the act of trust by which one being, a sinner, commits himself to another being, a Saviour.
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Fashionable dances as now carried on are revolting to every feeling of delicacy and propriety and are fraught with the greatest danger to millions.
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God made sin possible just as he made all lying wonders possible, but he never made it a fact, never set anything in his plan to harmonize with it. Therefore it enters the world as a forbidden fact against everything that God has ordained.
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It is not necessary for all men to be great in action. The greatest and sublimest power is often simple patience.
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Christ does not dress up a moral picture, and ask you to observe its beauty. He only tells you how to live; and the most beautiful characters the world has ever seen, have been those who received and lived these precepts without once conceiving their beauty.
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Education is only second to nature.
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Morality, taken as apart from religion, is but another name for decency in sin. It is just that negative species of virtue which consists in not doing what is scandalously depraved and wicked. But there is no heart of holy principle in it, any more than there is in the grosser sin.
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Morality, taken as apart from religion, is but another name for decency of sin.
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When has the world seen a phenomenon like this? a lonely uninstructed youth, coming from amid the moral darkness of Galilee, even more distinct from His age, and from every thing around Him, than a Plato would be rising up in some wild tribe in Oregon, assuming thus a position at the head of the world and maintaining it, for eighteen centuries, by the pure self-evidence of His life and doctrine.
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My own experience is that the Bible is dull when I am dull. When I am really alive, and set in upon the text with a tidal pressure of living affinities, it opens, it multiplies discoveries, and reveals depths even faster than I can note them. The worldly spirit shuts the Bible; the Spirit of God makes it a fire, flaming out all meanings and glorious truths.
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Be sure that Christ is not behind you, but before, calling and drawing you on. This is the liberty, the beautiful liberty of Christ. Claim your glorious privilege in the name of a disciple; be no more a servant, when Christ will own you as a friend.
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O Thou Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world, what Thou bearest in Thy blessed hands and feet I cannot bear; take it all away. Hide me in the depths of Thy suffering love, mold me to the image of Thy divine passion.
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Feeble are we? Yes, without God we are nothing. But what, by faith, every man may be, God requires him to be. This is the only Christian idea of duty. Measure obligation by inherent ability! No, my brethren, Christian obligation has a very different measure. It is measured by the power that God will give us, measured by the gifts and possible increments of faith. And what a reckoning will it be for many of us, when Christ summons us to answer before Him under the law, not for what we are, but for what we might have been.
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The more difficulties one has to encounter, within and without, the more significant and the higher in inspiration his life will be.
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However dark our lot may be, there is light enough on the other side of the cloud, in that pure empyrean where God dwells, to irradiate every darkness of this world; light enough to clear every difficult question, remove every ground of obscurity, conquer every atheistic suspicion, silence every hard judgment, light enough to satisfy, nay, to ravish the mind forever.
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The peoples of the old world have their cities built for times gone by, when railroads and gunpowder were unknown. We can have cities for the new age that has come, adopted to its better conditions of use and ornament. We want, therefore, a city planning profession.
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Christ wants to lead men by their love, their personal love to Him, and the confidence of His personal love to them.
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We are to work after no set fashion of high endeavor; but to walk with Jesus, performing, as it were, a ministry on foot, that we may stop at the humblest matter, and prove our fidelity there.
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Forgiveness is man's deepest need and highest achievement.
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