Phillips Brooks

What is the Christian? Everywhere the man who, so far as he comprehends Jesus Christ, so far as he can get any knowledge of Him, is His servant - the man who makes Christ a teacher of his intelligence and the guide of his soul - the man who obeys Christ as far as he has been able to understand him. . . . I would know any man as a Christian, would rejoice to know any man as a Christian, whom Jesus would recognize as a Christian; and Jesus Christ, I am sure, in these old days recognized His followers even if they came after Him with the blindest sight, with the most imperfect recognition and acknowledgment of what He was and of what He could do.

We are haunted by an ideal life, and it is because we have within us the beginning and the possibility of it.

Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God's Paradise.

O little town of Bethlehem, How still we see thee lie; Above thy deep and dreamless sleep The silent stars go by; Yet in thy dark streets shineth The everlasting Light. The hopes and fears of all the years Are met in thee tonight. For Christ is born of Mary, And, gathered all above While mortals sleep,the angels keep Their watch of wond'ring love. O morning stars, together Proclaim the holy birth, And praises sing to God the King, And peace to men on earth. How silently, how silently The wondrous gift is giv'n! So God imparts to human hearts The blessings of his heav'n. No ear may hear his coming; But in this world of sin, Where meek souls will receive him, still The dear Christ enters in.

As the Master Wills: Slowly, through all the universe, the temple of God is being built. Wherever, in any world, a soul, by free-willed obedience, catches the fire of God's likeness, it is set into the growing walls, a living stone. When, in your hard fight, in your tiresome drudgery, or in your terrible temptation, you catch the purpose of your being, and give yourself to God, and so give Him the chance to give Himself to you, your life, a living stone, is taken up and set into that growing wall. Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely ways;-there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple. Oh, if the stone can only have some vision of the temple of which it is to be a part forever, what patience must fill it as it feels the blows of the hammer, and knows that success for it is simply to let itself be wrought into what shape the Master wills.

A prayer, in its simplest definition, is merely a wish turned heavenward.

The great Easter truth is not that we are to live newly after death - that is not the great thing - but that we are to be new here and now by the power of the resurrection; not so much that we are to live forever as that we are to, and may, live nobly now because we are to live forever.

Call your opinions your creed, and you will change it every week. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you may keep it to the end.

Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or the realization of our duty and privilege as God's children.

Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely way, there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple.