Quotes on Christianity

When God gets ready to shake America, He may not take the Ph.D. and the D.D. God may choose a country boy ... God may choose the man that no one knows, a little nobody, to shake America for Jesus Christ in this day, and I pray that He would!

For those who feel it, nothing makes the soul so religious and pure as the endeavor to create something perfect; for God is perfection, and whoever strives after it, is striving after something divine. True painting is only the image of the perfection of God, a shadow of the pencil with which he paints, a melody, a striving after harmony.

There is no justification without sanctification, no forgiveness without renewal of life, no real faith from which the fruits of new obedience do not grow.

Many people perceive Christianity as something institutional - rather than as an encounter with Christ - which explains why they don't see it as a source of joy.

We would labor earnestly to raise a believer in salvation by free will into a believer in salvation by grace, for we long to see all religious teaching built upon the solid rock of truth and not upon the sand of imagination. At the same time, our grand object is not the revision of opinions, but the regeneration of natures. We should bring men to Christ, not to our own particular views of Christianity.

The only thing wrong with Christianity is the lack of suffering.

My first encounters with faith came about the time I was a Boy Scout, at about 14 or 15. I made the logical deduction that they operate the same way; I treated my faith like earning a merit badge, and everything about Christianity was about earning merit badges.

Spare the rod and spoil the child - that is true. But, beside the rod, keep an apple to give him when he has done well.

Of all the tyrannies that effect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in; but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity.

If Christianity was morality, Socrates would be the Saviour.

The Roman Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone - for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.

The advocate of religious freedom is to expect neither peace nor forgiveness from [the clergy].

In our early struggles for liberty, religious freedom could not fail to become a primary object.

It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it (i.e. the Book of Revelations), and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherence of our own nightly dreams.

I have never conceived that having been in public life required me to belie my sentiments, or to conceal them. Opinion and the just maintenance of it shall never be a crime in my view, nor bring injury on the individual. I never will by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance. I never had an opinion in politics or religion which I was afraid to own; a reserve on these subjects might have procured me more esteem from some people, but less from myself.

I believe because I am told to believe ... My faith is faith; it is not evolved out of argumentation, nor does it seek the aid of that.

The first and almost the only Book deserving of universal attention is the Bible.

Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christians.

The relation of faith between subject and object is unique in every case. Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself.

God is an ever-present spirit guiding all that happens to a wise and holy end.

God never put anyone in a place too small to grow in.