In God's world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain.

God’s highest gifts – talent, beauty, feeling, imagination, power – they carry with them the possibility of the highest heaven and the lowest hell. Be sure that it is by that which is highest in you that you may be lost.

Brethren, happiness is not our being’s end and aim. The Christian’s aim is perfection, not happiness; and every one of the sons of God must have something of that spirit which marked his Master.

Humility is that simple, inner life of real greatness, which is indifferent to magnificence, and, surrounded by it all, lives far away in the distant country of a Father’s home, with the cross borne silently and self-sacrificingly in the heart of hearts.

Heaven begun is the living proof that makes the heaven to come credible. Christ in you is “the hope of glory.” It is the eagle eye of faith which penetrates the grave, and sees far into the tranquil things of death. He alone can believe in immortality who feels the resurrection in him already.

False notions of liberty are strangely common. People talk of it as if it meant the liberty of doing whatever one likes – whereas the only liberty that a man, worthy of the name of man, ought to ask for, is, to have all restrictions, inward and outward, removed that prevent his doing what he ought.

What the world calls virtue is a name and a dream without Christ. The foundation of all human excellence must be laid deep in the blood of the Redeemer’s cross, and in the power of His resurrection.

Sow the seeds of life – humbleness, pure-heartedness, love; and in the long eternity which lies before the soul, every minutest grain will come up again with an increase of thirty, sixty, or a hundred fold.

Only what coronation is in an earthly way, baptism is in a heavenly way; God’s authoritative declaration in material form of a spiritual reality.

That prayer which does not succeed in moderating our wishes – in changing the passionate desire into still submission, the anxious, tumultuous expectation into silent surrender – is no true prayer, and proves that we have not the spirit of true prayer.