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It is not God's way that great blessings should descend without the sacrifice first of great sufferings. If the truth is to be spread to any wide extent among the people, how can we dream, how can we hope, that trial and trouble shall not accompany its going forth.

Commemoration of William Wilberforce, Social Reformer, 1833 The generality of nominal Christians... are almost entirely taken up with the concerns of the present world. They know indeed that they are mortal, but they do not feel it. The truth rests in their understandings, and cannot gain admission into their hearts. This speculative persuasion is altogether different from that strong practical impression of the infinite importance of eternal things, which, attended with a proportionate sense of the shortness and uncertainty of all below, while it prompts to activity from a conviction that the night cometh when no man can work, produces a certain firmness of texture, which hardens us against the buffetings of fortune, and prevents our being very deeply penetrated by the cares and interests, the good or evil, of this transitory state.

Feast of Oswald, King of Northumbria, Martyr, 642 We do not very often come across opportunities for exercising strength, magnanimity, or magnificence; but gentleness, temperance, modesty, and humility, are graces which ought to color everything we do. There may be virtues of a more exalted mold, but... these are the most continually called for in daily life.

[In a] natural fear of lowering the Divine dignity of Christ, we often forget His true humanity. We think of His earthly life as moving on a plane so different from ours that no parallel can be drawn between them. What we forget is, that He too needed to walk by faith, needed to be filled with the Holy Spirit, needed the sympathy of loving friends, needed the strengthening that is gained by private prayer. His strong and beautiful, serene and holy life so fills the eye that we lose sight of His secret intercourse with the Father, out of which came all its beauty, all its power.

Commemoration of John Mason Neale, Priest, Poet, 1866 I clearly recognize that all good is in God alone, and that in me, without Divine Grace, there is nothing but deficiency... The one sole thing in myself in which I glory, is that I see in myself nothing in which I can glory.

Feast of Dominic, Priest, Founder of the Order of Preachers, 1221 Verily, if thou desirest to have the Creator of all creatures, thou must renounce all creatures; for it cannot be otherwise, but only insomuch as thy soul is emptied and bared; the less of the creature, the more of God: this is but a fair bargain.

Does not the public repudiation of the whole Christian scheme of life in a large part of what was once known as Christendom force one to confront the question whether the path of Wisdom is not rather to attempt to work out a Christian doctrine of modern society and to order our national life in accordance with it? Those who would give a quick, easy or confident answer to this question have failed to understand it. It cannot even be seriously considered without a profound awareness of the extent to which Christian ideas have lost their hold over, or faded from the consciousness of, large sections of the population; of the far-reaching changes that would be called for in the structure, institutions and activities of existing society, which is in many of its features a complete denial of the Christian understanding of the meaning and end of man's existence; and of the stupendous and costly spiritual, moral, and intellectual effort that any genuine attempt to order national life in accordance with the Christian understanding of life would demand.

Next to the wicked lives of men, nothing is so great a disparagement and weakening to religion as the divisions of Christians.

God's redemptive revelation in Scripture is necessary to saving faith and peace with God. Faith in a risen Savior is necessary if the vague stirrings toward immortality are to bring us to restful and satisfying communion with God.

This concern for the rights and liberties and welfare of the backward peoples is rooted in the Christian ethic of justice and of the duty to help and protect the weak, upon the Christian valuation of man as of spiritual dignity and worth, as made for freedom, as a potential child of God. These principles have no validity unless the Christian view of man be true.

The Church on earth is a cross-eyed church, with one eye on God in His heavenly benediction, and one eye on the needy world of men.

He who has learned to pray has learned the greatest secret of a holy and happy life.

This is our great need, to be more like Christ, that His likeness may be seen in our lives; and this is just what is promised to us as we yield ourselves in full surrender to the working of His Spirit. Then, as we draw nearer to Christ, we shall be drawn nearer to His people; and in our search for unity with the members we shall be drawn closer to the Head.

That faith alone will never forsake Christ which springs out of or is built upon a conviction of the need for Him.

Feast of Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, Martyr, 258 Commemoration of Ninian, Bishop of Galloway, Apostle to the Picts, c. 430 Commemoration of Edward Bouverie Pusey, Priest, tractarian, 1882 God desires and is pleased to communicate with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills, and our emotions. The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the souls of the redeemed men and women is the throbbing heart of the New Testament.

A system of doctrine has risen up during the last three centuries, in which faith or spiritual-mindedness is contemplated and rested on as the end of religion, instead of Christ. I do not mean to say that Christ is not mentioned as the author of all good, but that stress is laid on the believing rather than on the object of belief, on the comfort and persuasiveness of the doctrine than on the doctrine itself. And in this way religion is made to consist of contemplating ourselves, instead of Christ; not simply in looking to Christ, but in seeing that we look to Christ; not in His divinity and atonement, but in our conversion and faith in Him... [Continued tomorrow].

The fashion of the day has been to attempt to convert by insisting on conversion; to exhort men to be converted; to tell them to be sure they look at Christ instead of simply holding up Christ; to tell them to have faith rather than to supply its object; to lead them to work up their minds, instead of impressing upon them the thought of Him who can savingly work in them; to bid them to be sure their faith is justifying, that it is not dead, formal, self-righteous, or merely moral, instead of delineating Him whose image, fully delineated, destroys deadness, formality, self-righteousness; to rely on words, vehemence, eloquence, and the like, rather than to aim at conveying the one great idea, whether in words or not.

Commemoration of William Morris, Artist, Writer, 1896 Commemoration of George Kennedy Bell, Bishop of Chichester, Ecumenist, Peacemaker, 1958 We admit no faith to be justifying, which is not itself and in its own nature a spiritually vital principle of obedience and good works.

Commemoration of Ethelburga, Abbess of Barking, 675 The valley of the shadow of death holds no darkness for the child of God. There must be light, else there could be no shadow. Jesus is the light. He has overcome death.

Feast of Henry Martyn, Translator of the Scriptures, Missionary in India & Persia, 1812 Weak and imperfect men shall, notwithstanding their frailties and effects, be received as having pleased God, if they have done their utmost to please Him.