American clergyman (1814-1882)
You can be nobody but yourself. You cannot hide away, nor be lost in any crowd. You carry the glory and the burden of your individuality.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
Ah, think not meanly of yourselves, and sink into no common mass of being, as if your individuality were ever destructible or not all significant. You are bounded and confined by the impassable limits of that mystery we call "ourselves."
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
And if moral truth has its high authority in the very nature of man, so that he who utters it nobly and faithfully needs no credentials but the truth itself, which is a cipher to which all men hold the key, so, again, the possession of the truth is the true and self-sealed commission to declare it, investing its holder with sacred and all-commanding powers.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
God is a moral being, a being in whom justice, rectitude, goodness reign supreme. He has made man a moral being, and wound his nature up with the same moral weights that move is own divine life.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
We do not undertake to quarrel with the laws of nature. Our ignorance oftentimes puts us in opposition to them, and a very expensive position we find it to be, because they never yield, and in the end, of course, we must.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
It is the plainest and simplest of things that most daunt and confuse us.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
The moment any man aims to live to his Maker's glory, to live like a man, and not like a servant of the world or the Devil, to live for God's eye and service, to live from the divine motive--the only saving on, love--which is alike love for excellence, truth, goodness, and love for God, and love for God's children--that moment the world with its false standards and prices recedes and falls into its place. Then the humble, the pure and good, become our true nobility.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
Christianity cannot exist where death is believed to be the end of man; for men who believe that, not only lose their sense of God, but very soon their faith in moral distinctions.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
The terms used in the New Testament concerning spiritual things require a courageous translation into their equivalent modern phrases. Nothing can be more perversive of their true significance than to insist in forcing our later and fuller-grown intelligence and moral experience back into the letter of the phrases which were appropriate and expressive of the thoughts of the sacred writers. It is not merely that the Apostles and Evangelists used words that no longer convey to us the thoughts they were urging upon contemporaries; but the thoughts themselves were often not such as we can now honestly entertain. It is only the principles of which their thoughts were the local or timely expression that we can consider permanently the same and equally important now as then.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
Until that faith rests upon clearer intellectual grounds, and is more recognized by science and culture, it is probable that the better intstincts of humanity, having once tasted the charm and glory of the supernatural, will cling to the miraculous as its most obvious form. The bird stays in its nest until its wings are grown. Ideas still callow must keep their cradles too; and whatever may come ages hence, there is no evidence yet that the world has outgrown its need of Church protection or of Christian guidance.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
But it is clear enough that the Apostles thought this world so bad and so hopeless, that they believed it given over to speedy destruction; that only a remnant of it were or would become subjects of Divine favor, or participators in the salvation which they proclaimed.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
Man's nature is in harmony with God's nature, in whose image it is made; so that there is not one truth in heaven and another truth on earth; one right for God and another right for man; one beauty for angels and another beauty for mortals; but the true, the right, the beautiful are universal in their nature and absolute in their authority.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
There is in you, the least of you, what only God could give out of his inmost and highest being, a spiritual existence.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York
We cannot make things true by any amount of effort; we can merely discover what God has made true from all eternity.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
To come from God, is to come from divine wisdom, love, and truth.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Twenty-Four Sermons Preached in All Souls Church, New York