For my part, I love to stand foot to foot with an honest foeman. To open warfare, bold and true hearts raise no objection but the ground of quarrel; it is covert enmity which we have most cause to fear, and best reason to loathe. That crafty kindness which inveigles me to sacrifice principle is the serpent in the grass - deadly to the incautious wayfarer.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the value of honesty in conflict and warns against deceit disguised as kindness.
Charles Spurgeon discusses the importance of facing one's adversaries with honesty and integrity, contrasting this with covert hostility that hides behind a facade of kindness. He suggests that true enmity is to be feared more than open conflict and warns that those who disguise their intentions can lead others to compromise their principles, comparing such deceit to a hidden danger like a snake in the grass.
In practice
In a speech about ethical leadership, this quote illustrates the importance of transparency in challenging situations.
Amusement should be used to do us good “like a medicine”: it must never be used as the food of the man...Many have had all holy thoughts and gracious resolutions stamped out by perpetual trifling. Pleasure so called is the murderer of thought. This is the age of excessive amusement: everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle.
When you see no present advantage, walk by faith and not by sight. Do God the honor to trust Him when it comes to matters of loss for the sake of principle.
It is far easier to fight with sin in public than to pray against it in private.
You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.
After faith comes repentance, or, rather, repentance is faith's twin brother and is born at the same time.
["All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant."] The original Hebrew word that has been translated "paths" means "well-worn roads' or "wheel tracks," such ruts as wagons make when they go down our green roads in wet weather and sink in up to the axles. God's ways are at times like heavy wagon tracks that cut deep into our souls, yet all of them are merciful.
Out of our first century of national life we evolved the ethical principle that it was not right or just that an honest and industrious man should live and die in misery. He was entitled to some degree of sympathy and security. Our conscience declared against the honest workman's becoming a pauper, but our eyes told us that he very often did.
The thing that brings people to wail at a wall, or face Mecca, or to go to church, is a search for that feeling of purity.
To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.
One problem with globalisation is that bad ideas seem to travel faster than good ones; first there was smearing tomato ketchup on everything; then drinking sugar-soaked cocktails ('Cosmo'-politanism) instead of our traditional whisky soda, and now this idea that we should abandon the poor to their fate in order to protect their dignity.
[T]he essence of belief is doubt, the essence of reality is questioning. The essence of Time is Flow, not Fix. The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows and that everything must change. The growing man is Man Alive, and his "philosophy" must grow, must flow, with him. . . . the man too fixed today, unfixed tomorrow - and his body of beliefs is nothing but a series of fixations.
Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
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