Ἔπεα Ἄπτερα Comfort ye, comfort ye my people...

These Ears of Corn, gathered and rubbed in my hands upon broken Sabbaths, I offer first to my Wife, and then to my other Friends. Of this passage in the life of our Lord, the account given by St. Mark...

These Ears of Corn, gathered and rubbed in my hands upon broken Sabbaths, I offer first to my Wife, and then to my other Friends....

Of this passage in the life of our Lord, the account given by St. Mark is the more complete. But it may be enriched and its lesson rendered yet more evident from the record of St. Matthew. “Verily I s...

Nothing is inexorable but love. Love which will yield to prayer is imperfect and poor. Nor is it then the love that yields, but its alloy. For if at the voice of entreaty love conquers displeasure, it...

The aspiring child is often checked by the dull disciple who has learned his lessons so imperfectly that he has never got beyond his schoolbooks. Full of fragmentary rules, he has perceived the princi...

Whatever belonging to the region of thought and feeling is uttered in words, is of necessity uttered imperfectly. For thought and feeling are infinite, and human speech, although far-reaching in scope...

Whether the Book of the Revelation be written by the same man who wrote the Gospel according to St. John or not, there is, at least, one element common to the two⁠—the mysticism. I use the word mystic...

To understand the words of our Lord is the business of life. For it is the main road to the understanding of The Word himself. And to receive him is to receive the Father, and so to have Life in ourse...

This narrative must have one of two origins. Either it is an invention, such as many tales told of our Lord in the earlier periods of Christianity; or it came from our Lord himself, for, according to ...

I do not know that I should dare to approach this, of all utterances into which human breath has ever been moulded, most awful in import, did I not feel that, containing both germ and blossom of the f...

Neither St. Matthew nor St. Mark tells us of any words uttered by our Lord after the Eloi. They both, along with St. Luke, tell us of a cry with a loud voice, and the giving up of the ghost; between w...

The original here quoted by our Lord is to be found in the words of God to Moses, (Leviticus 19:18): “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love...

Is not this at length too much to expect? Will a man ever love his enemies? He may come to do good to them that hate him; but when will he pray for them that despitefully use him and persecute him? Wh...

It is a recurring cause of perplexity in our Lord’s teaching, that he is too simple for us; that while we are questioning with ourselves about the design of Solomon’s earring upon some gold-plated doo...

These also after eighteen years to my wife Coraggio, Bordighera January 1885 For reasons many and profound, amongst the least because of the fragmentary nature of the records, he who would read them w...

These also after eighteen years to my wife Coraggio, Bordighera January 1885...

For reasons many and profound, amongst the least because of the fragmentary nature of the records, he who would read them without the candle of the Lord⁠—that is, the light of truth in his inward part...

I suspect there is scarcely a young man rich and thoughtful who is not ready to feel our Lord’s treatment of this young man hard. He is apt to ask, “Why should it be difficult for a rich man to enter ...

After feeding the four thousand with seven loaves and a few small fishes, on the east side of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus, having crossed the lake, was met on the other side by certain Pharisees, whose ...

The impossibility of doing what we would as we would, drives us to look for help. And this brings us to a new point of departure. Everything difficult indicates something more than our theory of life ...

“How should any design of the All-wise be altered in response to prayer of ours!” How are we to believe such a thing? By reflecting that he is the All-wise, who sees before him, and will not block his...

There is a thing wonderful and admirable in the parables, not readily grasped, but specially indicated by the Lord himself⁠—their unintelligibility to the mere intellect. They are addressed to the con...

The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is, to cry Father! from a full heart. I would help whom I may to call thus upon the Father. There are things in all forms of the systematic teaching of Christi...

In a word, He came to supply all our lack⁠—from the root outward; for what is it we need but more life? What does the infant need but more life? What does the bosom of his mother give him but life in ...

It is not alone the first beginnings of religion that are full of fear. So long as love is imperfect, there is room for torment. That love only which fills the heart⁠—and nothing but love can fill any...

The book of Job seems to me the most daring of poems: from a position of the most vantageless realism, it assaults the very citadel of the ideal! Its hero is a man seated among the ashes, covered with...

Christ is the way out, and the way in; the way from slavery, conscious or unconscious, into liberty; the way from the unhomeliness of things to the home we desire but do not know; the way from the sto...

How have we learned Christ? It ought to be a startling thought, that we may have learned him wrong. That must be far worse than not to have learned him at all: his place is occupied by a false Christ,...

To my wife. Sun and wind and rain, the Lord Is to seed his Father buried; For he is the living Word, And the quickening Spirit. Bordighera May 3, 1889 It seems to me that any lover of the gospel given...

To my wife. Sun and wind and rain, the Lord Is to seed his Father buried; For he is the living Word, And the quickening Spirit. Bordighera May 3, 1889...

It seems to me that any lover of the gospel given to thinking, and especially one accustomed to the effort of uttering thought, can hardly have failed to feel dissatisfaction, more or less definite, w...

We shall know one day just how near we come in the New Testament to the very words of the Lord. That we have them with a difference, I cannot doubt. For one thing, I do not believe he spoke in Greek. ...

We may see from this passage how the apostle Paul received the Lord, and how he understands his life to be the light of men, and so their life also. Of all writers I know, Paul seems to me the most pl...

When the man of the five senses talks of “truth,” he regards it but as a predicate of something historical or scientific proved a fact; or, if he allows that, for aught he knows, there may be higher t...

As this passage stands, I have not been able to make sense of it. No man could be in the house of the Father in virtue of being the servant of sin; yet this man is in the house as a servant, and the h...

Pilate asks Jesus if he is a king. The question is called forth by what the Lord had just said concerning his kingdom, closing with the statement that it was not of this world. He now answers Pilate t...

Some of the translators make it “kindness” and “goodness”; but I presume there is no real difference among them as to the character of the word which here, in the English Bible, is translated mercy. T...

We call the story of Jesus, told so differently, yet to my mind so consistently, by four narrators, “the gospel.” What makes this tale “the good news”? Is everything in the story of Christ’s life on e...

Grimm, in his lexicon to the New Testament, after giving as the equivalent of the word ἐμβριμάομαι in pagan use, “I am moved with anger,” “I roar or growl,” “I snort at,” “I am vehemently angry or ind...

What does the apostle mean by the righteousness that is of God by faith? He means the same righteousness Christ had by his faith in God, the same righteousness God himself has. In his second epistle t...

God is not a God that hides, but a God that reveals. His whole work in relation to the creatures he has made⁠—and where else can lie his work?⁠—is revelation⁠—the giving them truth, the showing of him...

To have a share in any earthly inheritance, is to diminish the share of the other inheritors. In the inheritance of the saints, that which each has, goes to increase the possession of the rest. Hear w...

There was no such change in the feeding of the multitudes. The fish and the bread were fish and bread before. I think this is significant as regards the true nature of a miracle, and its relation to t...