What They Said

“Our duty, privilege, and security are in believing, not in knowing;  in trusting God, and not our own understanding. They are to be pitied who have no more trustworthy teacher than themselves.”

Charles Hodge

"No one truth is rightly held till it is clearly conceived and stated, and no single truth is adequately comprehended till it is viewed in harmonious relations to all the other truths of the system of which Christ is the centre.""

A. A. Hodge

"Furthermore, the field of Christianity is the world. The Christian cannot be satisfied so long as any human activity is either opposed to Christianity or out of all connection with Christianity. Christianity must pervade not merely all nations, but also all of human thought. The Christian, therefore, cannot be indifferent to any branch of earnest human endeavor. It must all be brought into some relation to the gospel. It must be studied either in order to be demonstrated as false, or else in order to be made useful in advancing the Kingdom of God."

J. Gresham Machen

"Divinity is the doctrine of living unto God"

William Ames

"Not I, but Christ;  not my will, but Christ's;  not my ease, not my lust, not my feckless credit, but Christ, Christ."

Samuel Rutherford

"Christ is that Fountain of living water which God has graciously provided for thirsting souls."

J.C. Ryle

"Many have passed the rocks of gross sins - who have suffered shipwreck upon the sands of self-righteousness."

William Secker

“Selfishness is one of the principal fruits of the corruption of human nature;  and it is obvious that selfishness disposes us to over-rate our good qualities, and to overlook or extenuate our defects.”

William Wilberforce

"Divine sovereignty is not the sovereignty of a tyrannical Despot, but the exercised pleasure of One who is infinitely wise and good! Because God is infinitely wise He cannot err, and because He is infinitely righteous He will not do wrong.  Here then is the preciousness of this truth. The mere fact itself that God's will is irresistible and irreversible fills me with fear, but once I realize that God wills only that which is good. My heart is made to rejoice."

A.W. Pink

"…., to teach us to set no time to the Lord the creator of time, for His time is always best,…"

Samuel Rutherford

"Self is the great antichrist and anti-God in the world, that sets up itself above all else."

Stephen Charnock

"Tell me what the world is saying today, and I'll tell you what the church will be saying seven years from now."

Francis Schaeffer

"Remember you are God's sword -- His instrument -- I trust a chosen vessel unto Him to bear His name.  In great measure, according to the purity and perfections of the instrument will be the success.  It is not great talents God blesses so much as a greg likeness to Jesus.  A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God."

Robert Murray M'Cheyene

(Written to Re. Dan. Edwards)

"A Christian, for the sweet fruit he bears to God and men, is compared to the noblest of all plants, the vine.  Now as the most generous vine, if not pruned, runs out into many superfluous stems and grows at last weak and fruitless: so doth the best man, if he be not cut short of his desires and pruned with afflictions."

Joseph Hall

"Finally, let us not forget the religious character of our origin. Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion.  They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope.  They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political or literary.  Let us cherish these sentiments, and extend this influence still more widely; in the full conviction, that that is the happiest society which partakes in the highest degree of the mild and peaceful spirit of Christianity."

Daniel Webster

"My brethren, when God first began to love you, he gave you all that he ever meant to give you in the lump, and eternity of time is that in which he is retailing it out."

Thomas Goodwin

"But what a terrible thing to be unable to perceive the fragrance of the name of Jesus, which is as ointment poured forth ; unable to taste the sweet flavour of the bread of heaven, or the richness of that wine on the lees well refined, which makes the saints of God so glad.  I had rather be blind and deaf and dumb, and lose my taste and smell, than not love Christ.  To be unable to appreciate Him, is the worst of disabilities, the most serious of calamities. It is not the loss of a single spiritual faculty, but it proves the death of the soul.  It evidences the absence of all that can make existence worth the having, for he that hath not the Son hath not life, and the wrath of God abideth on him."

Charles Spurgeon

"Only Christ is the whole man's happiness, the sun to enlighten him, the physician to heal him, the wall of fire to defend him, the friend to comfort him, the pearl to enrich him, the ark to support him, the rock to sustain him under the heaviest pressures;  As an hiding place from the wind and a covert from the tempest, as rivers of waters in a dry place, and as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."

Isaac Ambrose

"In answer to this, you must know, that as God hath decreed the end, so He hath decreed the means that are proper for attaining that end; so that these two must not be separated."

Thomas Boston

"Divisions in the church always breed atheism in the world."

Thomas Manton