It is not with a rush and a spring that we are to reach Christ's character, and attain to perfect saintship; but step by step, foot by foot, hand over hand, we are slowly and often painfully to mount the ladder that rests on earth, and rises to heaven.
Interpretation
Achieving a virtuous character requires patience and perseverance.
This quote emphasizes the gradual and often challenging process of spiritual growth and moral development. Rather than expecting instantaneous transformation, it suggests that we must patiently climb step by step, acknowledging that true change requires time, effort, and often struggle as we aspire towards higher ideals.
In practice
When discussing personal development in a seminar.
If you find yourself loving any pleasure more than your prayers, any book better than the Bible, any house better than the house of the Lord, any table better than the Lord's table, any persons better than Christ, or any indulgence better than the hope of heaven – be alarmed.
A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness. Science has nothing to do with it, friends.
People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.
Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
That which is impenetrable to us really exists. Behind the secrets of nature remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.
Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence.
In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.
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